Leah D. Sheppard’s research while affiliated with Washington State University and other places

Performance feedback is critical to employees’ development and advancement in organizations, but a variety of factors can compromise its integrity. In the current work, we develop a model proposing that feedback providers who feel social pressure to avoid exhibiting prejudice might overcorrect when delivering performance feedback to women, leading them to handle women with “velvet gloves” and deliver inflated performance feedback (i.e., omitting negative performance aspects and/or emphasizing positive performance aspects). In study 1, we explore the relationship between feedback-recipient gender and the nature of feedback in a naturalistic setting, finding that music critics at Rolling Stone provide more positive written reviews of albums by women musicians relative to men musicians, beyond what would be expected based on album star rating. In study 2, we experimentally test our full model, finding that feedback providers who feel social pressure to avoid exhibiting prejudice towards women express greater protective paternalism (i.e., feelings of protectiveness) when preparing to deliver feedback to a woman. Protective paternalism, in turn, predicts the delivery of more inflated performance feedback. In a supplementary study, we demonstrate that feedback providers who criticize women’s work performance are perceived as more prejudiced and less communal than those who criticize men’s performance, thereby highlighting a reason why individuals succumb to social pressures and deliver inflated feedback. Taken together, our results shed light on why and when women receive less developmental feedback than men, thereby elucidating a novel and counterintuitive mechanism by which gender inequities are maintained in organizations.

Research has neglected to consider the news as a source of work-related information that might impact employee experiences and outcomes. In an initial pilot study with a diverse cross-section of employees, we confirm that deriving work-related insights from the news, either intentionally or serendipitously, is a common occurrence. Next, drawing from conservation of resources theory, we developed a model to examine both the beneficial and detrimental consequences associated with job-relevant news consumption. We conducted a 10-day experience sampling study which showed that job-relevant news consumption increases information overload but also produces perceived learning. Information overload, perceived learning, and emotional exhaustion serially mediate the relationship between consumption of job-relevant news and employee withdrawal behavior. Furthermore, perceived learning buffers the indirect relationship between news consumption and work withdrawal via information overload and emotional exhaustion. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our research.

An assumption of sleep and self-regulation theories is that sleep quality impacts mood which, in turn, prompts individuals to revise their work-related goals. We propose that gender differences in emotion, emotional regulation, and career aspirations layer complexity onto these basic assumptions. In the current work, we investigate the effect of daily sleep quality – via positive affect – on intentions to pursue more status and responsibility at work (i.e., aspirations), as a function of participant gender. We test our model using experience sampling methodology, surveying 135 full-time employees residing in the United States twice daily across two consecutive work weeks (10 workdays), for a total of 2,272 observations. We find that among women, but not men, sleep quality is positively related to positive affect which, in turn, relates to greater daily intentions to pursue more status and responsibility at work. We discuss the implications of our work for research and practice.

Compared to their representation in the workforce, women are significantly underrepresented in leadership roles in the United States. Whereas substantial research attention has been paid to the role of bias and discrimination in perpetuating this gap, less has been devoted to exploring the gender difference in aspirations for these roles. We draw from social role theory to hypothesize that men have higher leadership aspirations than women and test our hypothesis using a meta-analysis of 174 U.S. published and unpublished samples (N = 138,557) spanning six decades. The results reveal that there is a small but significant gender difference in the predicted direction (Hedge's g = 0.22). Notably, the gender difference has not narrowed significantly over time, and appears to widen at college age and among working adults within male-dominated industries. Our results also suggest that the process and dissemination of research in this domain exhibits bias. We discuss the implications of our conclusions for future research.

Despite the importance of warmth and competence for social evaluation processes, we do not have a clear understanding of their relevance in entrepreneurial resource acquisition contexts. We examine the effects of cursory impressions of 350 Kickstarter crowdfunding entrepreneurs’ warmth and competence on the performance of their campaigns. Drawing from the stereotype content model and expectancy violation theory, we propose and find support for a model in which different forms of trust mediate the relationships between warmth and competence and crowdfunding performance, with the strength of these pathways differing as a function of entrepreneur gender. Specifically, we show that the crowdfunding performance of women entrepreneurs is uniquely benefited by perceptions of competence and the cognition-based trust that ensues, relative to the performance of men entrepreneurs.