Intergroup Contact Is Associated with Less Negative Attitude toward Women Managers: The Bolstering Effect of Social Dominance Orientation

Abstract

This cross-sectional study examined the intergroup contact hypothesis in the workplace by enrolling 150 Italian employees. Within the framework of social dominance theory, the purpose of this study was to test the assumption that individuals with higher levels of social dominance orientation are more likely to exhibit prejudice against women in managerial positions and benefit more from intergroup contact with a female supervisor. In particular, we found that individuals with higher levels of social dominance orientation exhibited more negative attitudes towards women in manager positions, but this effect only appeared when their superiors were women, as opposed to men. In addition, participants with higher social dominance orientation experienced more positive outcomes from intergroup contact, resulting in less negative attitudes toward women managers, than those with lower social dominance orientation. Overall, these findings yield insights into how intergroup contact affects individuals with prejudice tendencies, indicating that contact with the targeted group (i.e., women in managerial positions) is negatively associated with negative attitudes towards the group, even when the prejudice is driven by social dominance orientation. These results could shed light on new routes to design practical intervention aimed at solving prejudice towards women in leadership roles.

Motivation to Avoid Uncertainty, Implicit Person Theories about the Malleability of Human Attributes and Attitudes toward Women as Leaders vs. Followers: A Mediational Analysis

“…Moreover, this research also enriches the gender-based prejudices arena, since the results confirmed that the same process that brings people to hold that women are incompatible with leadership roles, also brings individuals to support the compatibility between women and followership roles. This information now stands beside a larger body of knowledge which revealed an important number of psychological constructs that lies at the core of the process between the need for closure and negative attitudes toward women leaders-e.g., [31,33,48,49].…”

“…Importantly for the field of negative attitudes toward women leaders, relevant and recent research has demonstrated that the positive relationship between the NCC and negative attitudes toward women as managers was moderated by the quality, but not the quantity, of current or past direct contact experiences with women managers [33]. In other words, fortunately, Allport's intergroup contact theory [51] seems to work also with respect to prejudice toward women leaders [48]. In this respect, since the present research highlights the mediational role of implicit person theories on the effect of the need for cognitive closure on negative attitudes toward women leaders, future interventions should shed light on the possible positive effect of intergroup contact on changing individuals beliefs from entity theories to incremental ones.…”

Epistemic Uncertainty, Social Dominance Orientation, and Prejudices toward Women in Leadership Roles: Mediation and Moderation Analyses

“…Examining criteria for the assessment of suitable individuals for occupying leadership positions in organizations is a pressing concern in current times-see, for instance, (Contu et al 2023a;Gelfand and Lorente 2021). Within the domain of social psychology, a pervasive and consequential tradition has sought to grapple with this matter through the lens of stereotypes.…”