Empowering Mimicry: Female Leader Role Models Empower Women in Leadership Tasks Through Body Posture Mimicry

Abstract

In two studies we investigated the behavioral process through which visible female leader role models empower women in leadership tasks. We proposed that women tend to mimic the powerful (open) body postures of successful female role models, thus leading to more empowered behavior and better performance on a challenging leadership task, a process we called empowering mimicry. In Study 1, we experimentally manipulated the body posture of the male and female role models and showed that 86 Swiss college women mimicked the body posture of the female (ingroup) but not the male (outgroup) role model, thus leading to more empowered behavior and better performance on a public speaking task. In Study 2, we investigated the boundary conditions of this process and showed that empowering mimicry does not extend to exposures to non-famous female models among 50 Swiss college women. These findings suggest that nonverbal mimicry is one important mechanism through which female leader role models inspire women performing a challenging leadership task. From a practice perspective, our research underscores the importance of female leaders' visibility because visibility can drive other women's advancement in leadership by affording women the opportunity to mimic and be empowered by successful female role models.Keywords Leadership . Role models . Nonverbal communication . Imitation . Empowerment . Human females . Gender Female role models can inspire girls and women in male-typical domains such as STEM (Cheryan et al. 2011;Dennehy and Dasgupta 2017), athletics (Greendorfer 1977), and managerial and political leadership (Latu et al. 2013;Simon and Hoyt 2013;Singh et al. 2006;Wolbrecht and Campbell 2007). There are several mechanisms that can account for these positive effects, including women's increased sense of belonging and self-confidence (Dennehy and Dasgupta 2017). In the current study, we propose an alternative, behavioral mechanism that explains how political female role models inspire women in leadership tasks.Specifically, we suggest that visible female role models in leadership may offer the opportunity for modeling empowering behaviors in women faced with leadership challenges. Essentially, female leader role models can show women how to behave in challenging situations-how to speak, stand, or move. In turn, women may model those behaviors and, as a result, be empowered by the female leader role models. More precisely, in the context of the current studies we propose that when women are exposed to visible female leader role models, they are likely to imitate those role models' nonverbal behavior, which ultimately empowers women during leadership challenges-a process we call empowering mimicry. As such, we argue that increasing women's visibility in leadership is important because female leaders' visibility is the engine that can further drive the advancement of women in leadership, by offering women the opportunity to imitate and be empowered by successful female role models. We focus on political leadership for ...

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