fitting” for men, regardless of their actual performance. On the other hand, women were rated more favourably than men when adopting a transformational leadership style, because this style is seen as more feminine. These findings depict how gender-based expectations play a role in evaluations of leadership. Supervisors are rated higher when they comply to the expectations for their gender. This concept is also known as role congruity theory (Douglas, 2012).
Goertzen and Fritz (2004) argue that the less job-related information that is available to a leader or subordinate, the more “room” is given to gender stereotypes to influence the development of LMX relationships. He also proposed that female leaders are thought to have less access to resources in general, which results in them being rated lower on quality of LMX. This effect is largest when women occupy a role that is seen as traditionally masculine, for example the role of CEO. Carli (2001) found that women whose competence was rated as highly as men’s, are seen as not complying to their gender role. She also noted that mainly men often do not acknowledge women’s contributions, especially when they perceive incongruence between their acquired position and gender role norms. When women manage to get to the top of a male-dominated organization, they are often perceived to have “beat” gender biases. However, these women sometimes achieve such a position by emphasizing how they differ from their female colleagues, stimulating gender bias. These so-called “queen bees” are found to have a low gender identification, and to distance themselves or more critically evaluate their female colleagues or subordinates (Derks, Van Laar, Ellemers, & de Groot, 2011). Consistent with these results, Adebayo and Udegbe (2004) argued that as a result of this queen bee syndrome, the relationship between female supervisors and subordinates could be affected negatively. In their 2004 study, they found the female-female dyadic relationship to be of the lowest quality, compared to other dyad combinations. Furthermore, they found male supervisor-female subordinate relationships to be of the highest quality. They explain this result by the paternalism theory, that states that women are seen as children and are to be protected. This would cause male supervisors to be more lenient towards their female subordinates