The paper discusses some gender debates in linguistic behaviour and suggests how scenario‐based research techniques may contribute. It then presents a survey‐based study of 157 Australian female, organisationally senior, managers. For each of three workplace communication dilemmas, participants evaluated a series of strategic responses, indicating both how effective and how probable they thought the responses were. Despite the participants’ seniority and confidence as communicators, their evaluation of the strategies often varied with whether they believed the communication strategist in the scenario was male or female. This suggests that even confident, organisationally senior women still maintain some traditional gender‐based ideas about good communication. Despite this, the participants’ own preferred communication strategies did not vary with their seniority or their confidence in expressing opinions. The study's theoretical and practical implications and some limitations are discussed, together with topics for further research.
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In an earlier study (Moores & Barrett 2002) we found successful CEOs had learned leadership of family controlled businesses (FCBs) in a series of distinct learning phases. Because that study's sample did not include many women, our present study focuses on women in FCBs to better understand how they exercise leadership and entrepreneurship in the family firm context. Case study analysis of an international sample of women FCB leaders, using frameworks which avoid essentialist assumptions about women's and men's approach to leadership, suggests there are some characteristic ways women leaders learn FCB leadership and entrepreneurship roles. We have tentatively labelled them stumbling into the spotlight, building your own stage, directing the spotlight elsewhere, and coping with shadows. Some interviewees had failed to attain leadership; we labelled their journey becoming invisible. This paper uses Eisenhardt's (1989) framework to elaborate on the stumbling into the spotlight and coping with shadows journeys and what can be learned from them.
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