Leader evaluation and team cohesiveness in the process of team development: A matter of gender?

Leadership positions are still stereotyped as masculine, especially in male-dominated fields (e.g., engineering). So how do gender stereotypes affect the evaluation of leaders and team cohesiveness in the process of team development? In our study participants worked in 45 small teams (4-5 members). Each team was headed by either a female or male leader, so that 45 leaders (33% women) supervised 258 team members (39% women). Over a period of nine months, the teams developed specific engineering projects as part of their professional undergraduate training. We examined leaders' self-evaluation, their evaluation by team members, and team cohesiveness at two points of time (month three and month nine, the final month of the collaboration). While we did not find any gender differences in leaders' self-evaluation at the beginning, female leaders evaluated themselves more favorably than men at the end of the projects. Moreover, female leaders were evaluated more favorably than male leaders at the beginning of the project, but the evaluation by team members did not differ at the end of the projects. Finally, we found a tendency for female leaders to build more cohesive teams than male leaders.

Predicting future conflict between team-members with parameter-free models of social networks.

Despite the well-documented benefits of working in teams, teamwork also results in communication, coordination and management costs, and may lead to personal conflict between team members. In a context where teams play an increasingly important role, it is of major importance to understand conflict and to develop diagnostic tools to avert it. Here, we investigate empirically whether it is possible to quantitatively predict future conflict in small teams using parameter-free models of social network structure. We analyze data of conflict appearance and resolution between 86 team members in 16 small teams, all working in a real project for nine consecutive months. We find that group-based models of complex networks successfully anticipate conflict in small teams whereas micro-based models of structural balance, which have been traditionally used to model conflict, do not.