Advisor gender and advice justification in advice taking

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify under what circumstances advisor gender and advice justification influence advice taking by managers. Design/methodology/approach The authors designed a quasirational managerial decision experiment with both analytic and intuitive cues. The design was a 2 × 2 between-subjects factorial, in which gender (male/female) and advice justification (intuitive/analytic) were crossed. The experiment involved two independent samples, taken from Amazon Mechanical Turk workers and Brazilian professionals. Findings Results suggest that, in general, analytic justification is more valued than intuitive justification. The findings also infer that depending on the advisees’ sample and providing that advice justification is analytic, quasirational scenarios seem to favor male advisors (MTurk sample) or both male and female advisors with “male values” (professional sample), as analysis is traditionally considered a “male value.” Practical implications Analytic justification will likely lead to more advice utilization in quasirational managerial situations, as it may act as a safeguard for the accuracy of the offered advice. Social implications The results might signal an ongoing, but slow, process leading to the mitigation of gender stereotypes, considering that the male gender stereotype was active in the MTurk sample, but not in the professional one. Originality/value This study contributes to the advice-taking research field by showing the interplay between advisor gender and advice justification in a quasirational managerial decision setting with both analytic and intuitive cues. In advice-taking literature, observations are usually collected from students. However, as this study focused on managerial decisions, the authors collected independent samples from MTurk workers and Brazilian professionals.

A systematic review of empirical studies on advice-based decisions in behavioral and organizational research.

“…Third, good justifications can also increase utilization. Participants in two studies that manipulated whether advice was justified by formal analysis or instead by intuition tended to prefer the former, utilizing advice justified by intuitions only when they had strong reasons to believe that said intuitions were well-founded (Ribeiro et al, 2020†; Tzioti et al, 2014†). In another study, participants reported preferring additional information about the alternatives over direct recommendations for or against actions, likely because it helped them improve decision accuracy and maintain decision autonomy (Dalal & Bonaccio, 2010‡).…”