Predicting Employee Perceptions Of Female Managers’ Sincerity

Two studies test whether female managers who seek to manage others’ impressions of their sincerity by ‘acting’ sincere will be more effective in creating sincerity impressions when they are low in trait sincerity. To arrive at this hypothesis, we draw on fundamental principles of trait-judgement: observability and evaluativeness. Because sincerity is a communal characteristic, it is highly evaluative for female managers; hence, female managers’ sincerity may be scrutinized more critically (than male managers’). Because sincerity is low in observability, for female leaders to be judged as sincere, they may need to actively act sincere, yet – given more critical scrutiny – they need to do so in a credible way. Ironically, low trait sincerity female managers may be better at convincingly acting sincere because they are more practiced at doing so. Results support this and imply that a modern-business emphasis on leader sincerity might imply a mixed blessing for female leaders.