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The purpose of this paper is to challenge the customary emphasis on masculine values in top management teams (TMTs) and offer a cultural feminist approach to improving women's participation in leadership roles in organisations.

The paper builds on the theory of diversity and “difference”, instead of “sameness”, to demonstrate the relationship between feminine values, team member diversity, and team effectiveness. The paper develops a three‐tier approach to making better use of gender diversity in TMTs: unravel masculine hegemony in the workplace; create awareness of distinct values offered by women as team members and team leaders; and progress team diversity from the customary token representation to gender inclusive team structures and routines.

The paper suggests that TMTs benefit when learning to accommodate and integrate feminine values, along with masculine values, into an inclusive work culture that enhances teams’ performing capacities.

Token representation is only one dimension of gendered disadvantage. Several complex forms of gendered disadvantage reside at macro‐level or extra‐organisational layers of life. Therefore, tackling masculine hegemony should involve a multilevel approach that tackles gendered disadvantage in domains as wide as work, organisation, and society.

Through the three‐tier framework for managing diversity in TMTs, the paper offers a practical way forward, moving beyond the current functional‐structured approach towards TMTs.

The paper argues that conventional diversity management practices remain influenced by a hegemonic masculine approach towards increasing women's participation in employment. Furthermore, a narrow emphasis on “sameness” instead of “diversity” of women and men reinforces male hegemony, contributing to the perpetuation of low numbers of women in TMTs.

The purpose of this paper is to reveal the relations between management control system (MCS), leadership style and gender ideology. It investigates how a female leader’s gendered personal values are formed, translated, produced, and reproduced in her leadership style, the subsequent MCS and organisational life.

This is an interpretive case study that uses the anthropological lens of emic and etic views. The emic view is derived from the interpretation of the company’s subjects. The etic view refers to the interpretation of outsiders (the researchers and previous literatures). The combination of these two views enables an in-depth understanding of the case. Interviews, observation and documentary analysis were used to collect the data.

In a gendered society, a female leader will gain full respect if she demonstrates leadership behaviours that fit her subordinates’ gendered expectations. The leader’s and followers’ common gendered cultural background will result in leadership and followership that support each other. Gendered leadership produces gendered MCS. Gendered MCS is based on gendered cultural values that direct the behaviour of organisational members to focus on certain competencies based on a single gender perspective. In turn, the gendered MCS sustains and reinforces the gendered leadership.

The study does not focus on the potential value of including feminine measures in MCS. In the future, MCS literatures need to explore the strategic advantages of introducing measures into the system in order to develop feminine competencies in organisation. Furthermore, the processes by which MCS reinforces gendered practices in a society are not explored in the study. Therefore, another important next step is to examine the patterns of the reinforcement processes and their magnitude in strengthening the biases beyond organisational boundaries (e.g. in professional and industrial practices).

This study encourages leaders to consider the use of masculine and feminine characters in MCS to increase organisational effectiveness, build a more humane organisational atmosphere, establish organisational cohesion and harmonise different personal aspirations.

MCS literatures tend to hide gender bias in the system. This study offers insight on how MCS translates, produces and reproduces societal gendered practices in organisational life.

Describes a research project that explores differences in values between male and female flying instructors. Hazardous attitudes and practices in aviation have been attributed to masculine values associated with the flying culture. Data were collected from male and female flying instructors and their approaches to resolving instructional dilemmas were compared. Findings were used to predict whether female instructors were likely to shift the culture towards more feminine values, or whether the culture was likely to shift the values of the female instructors. Finds evidence of female instructors being less analytical in their view of instructing, and more achievement oriented than men. Suggests that female instructors are reacting to existing masculine culture rather than promoting feminine values.

The purpose of this study is to examine and discuss whether women executives in the hospitality industry in Hong Kong adopt a feminine, masculine or gender-neutral approach to leadership.

This study focuses on women with positional power in senior-level leadership roles within the hospitality and tourism industry in Hong Kong. A qualitative approach was taken to capture the multiple dimensions of these female executive’s leadership orientations. The participants included 24 women executives.

Participants’ representations show that women have a multitude of leadership styles that operate on three continua. Not all women executives display leadership orientations that adhere to their indigenous culture values. Individual differences or differences related to the organizational culture are still relevant.

A low number of women in leadership positions in Hong Kong limited the selection process of participants. There might be a selection bias based on that the participants volunteered to participate in the research study and some declined. Findings are based on participants’ memory to reflect on their leadership styles.

Because of the traditional and conventional definitions of leadership, women leaders might feel that they should behave in a masculine way to be taken seriously as a leader. There is a need to understand whether women executives today manage to defeat these stereotypes and comfortably display a feminine approach to leadership. A culture that values and leverages feminine approaches in addition to masculine approaches is likely to have higher engagement and retention of women.

The purpose of this study is to examine cross‐cultural differences in gender role portrayals in web ads in Korea and the USA on the basis of Hofstede's masculinity dimension.

A quantitative content analysis was employed to obtain a numerically‐based summary of different themes and roles portrayed by women and men in 400 web ads.

A greater percentage of Korean ads featured characters in relationship themes, featured women as a main character, and portrayed them in family and recreational roles. To a large extent, the results validate the use of Hofstede's taxonomy, supporting the application of “masculinity” framework into the determination of appropriate advertising appeals‐related to gender roles.

International advertisers who are planning a global campaign for their gender‐related consumer products can benefit by locating the target country's position on Hofstede's masculinity index and using it as a guideline for creating visual images of main characters in the ads.

This study adds a new contribution to an international account of web advertising in maintaining a comprehensive understanding of contemporary gender role portrayals. It could benefit international advertisers with both practical and theoretical implications, for no systematic studies have ever touched the gender‐role issue with web advertising yet.

This research seeks to explore the nature and the structure of brands' masculine dimensions; to develop a reliable and a valid scale to measure brand masculinity and to explore the different brand masculine patterns.

A series of four studies developed and validated a two-factor, five-item measurement scale for brand masculinity using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Content and face validities; reliability and internal validity; convergent and discriminant validities were established. Generalisability of the two dimensions across the gendering of product categories was assessed. A cluster analysis was used to explore brand masculine patterns.

The results indicate that brand masculinity is a bi-dimensional construct (i.e. “Male chauvinism” and “Heroic” dimensions). A cluster analysis performed on 45 brands revealed four brand masculine patterns: hegemonic, emerging, chivalrous and subaltern.

French student subjects constitute the sample. Future studies might investigate the transferability of the results to other cultures. The classification scheme broadens the existing brand personality and brand gender literature and its derived brand taxonomies.

The results provide brand managers with a marketing tool to measure their brands' masculinity and allow them to adapt specific, previously developed gendered marketing strategies.

This research contributes to the brand personality and brand gender literature with new insights about the nature and structure of brands' masculine dimensions. The study moves the conceptualisation of this construct forward rejecting thus previous monolithic approaches to brand masculinity.

Attempts to transfer Western management theories without considering the host's cultural value system is a prescription for failure. While conceptual frameworks for understanding cultural differences exist, such as the ones developed by Hofstede and Hall, we know little about which managerial practices are relevant in what cultural settings. Adopting the view that the effectiveness of different management behaviors depends on the culture in which they are practiced, this paper develops various propositions that match specific managerial behaviors with cultural work values. The matching of managerial behaviors with cultural values has a wide range of applications in overseas selection decisions and training programs.

This paper aims to examine the interplay among forms of entrepreneurship and the gendered entrepreneurial divide. Using data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) and the World Values Survey (WVS), the authors investigate the likelihood that females will venture in the commercial entrepreneurial ventures versus social entrepreneurial ventures. The authors draw on the theoretical concept of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity to explain gender variance in the organizational forms of commercial and social entrepreneurship. Specifically, the authors investigate whether pursuing an opportunity in a society that highly values ideologies of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity impacts the probability of venturing in either of these kinds of organizations.

To test the hypotheses, the authors use GEM data from 2009 (n = 14,399) for nascent entrepreneurs and baby businesses owners in 55 counties. They also use the WVS to measure the ideologies of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity at the country level. The authors estimate a logistic multilevel model to identify the drivers of social venturing over commercial venturing. Data are nested by countries, and the authors allow random intercepts by countries with a variance components covariance structure.

The findings demonstrate that there is a divide in entrepreneurial activity, as women entrepreneurs are more likely to start social ventures than commercial ventures. They also find that hegemonic masculinity decreases the incidence of social entrepreneurship, whereas emphasized femininity increases the incidence of social entrepreneurship. Moreover, the authors find evidence that women in societies with a strong view on hegemonic masculinity are less likely to pursue social organizational forms than male entrepreneurs are. Furthermore, in societies with strong views of emphasized femininity, the probability increases that female founders will pursue social organizational forms. The findings highlight the considerable impact of the gender ideologies on entrepreneurship.

Although the authors use the terms “gender” and “sex” in this paper interchangeably, they recognize that these two terms are not equivalent. For the purposes of this manuscript, the authors use a gender analysis approach activity based on biological sex to investigate empirical differences in entrepreneurial. The findings suggest that women ultimately, and unintentionally, are consenting to the practices and norms that reiterate the masculinity of entrepreneurship. In this way, the patriarchal ideologies of hegemonic masculinity and masculinization of entrepreneurship ultimately leave women unable to fully take up the identity of “woman” alongside that of “entrepreneur”. Future research can build upon our findings by applying a more nuanced view of gender via constructivist approaches.

The findings empirically demonstrate the gendered nature of entrepreneurial activity, leading to specific stereotypical female social organizational forms and male commercial organizational forms. Furthermore, the authors are able to provide theoretical explanations based on hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity to understand why social entrepreneurship appeals to women.

The authors draw on an article by Fondas published in 1997 to expose a masculine ethos underlying “feminine” management practices, diffused through management texts. This is based on the findings that: management theories are of a masculine nature; companies seldom implement “feminine” practices; and those that do use those practices to maintain their underlying masculinity. This challenges academics and practitioners to recognize that management theory is gendered and that changes towards feminine organizations are superficial, at best.