ASPIRATIONALLY, AMY
DISCIPLINARY GROUNDING
THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
This project sits at an intersection of communication, leadership, gender, and cultural theories. While my topic lends itself to a broad spectrum of theoretical perspectives, my work is guided by the work of Lisa De-Frank Cole and Sherylle Tan’s (2022) Women and Leadership: Journey Toward Equity, Julia T. Wood’s (2005) Gendered Lives, and by the collection essays found in Carolyn Cunningham et al.’s (2017) Gender, Communication, and the Leadership Gap. These texts articulate a series of assumptions about the ways gender is socially constructed and reinforced through language and communication styles, the ways women experience and engage in communication in the workplace and positions of power, and the ways women and femmes must simultaneously embrace and thwart gendered stereotypes while also navigating phenomena like the double-bind that pits their likability against their competence. De-Frank Cole and Tan (2022) offer a useful discussion of behavioral and relational theories of leadership that suggests leadership can be learned because it is measured by performance, output, and connections, rather than traits. My project aims to provide women and femmes with resources to learn more about and practice behaviors associated with a variety of leadership styles like democratic, transformational, and authentic leadership. This project seeks to highlight how women can succeed when applying specific communication and relationship-building approaches that are associated with feminine leadership styles instead of adopting traditionally masculine methods of leading and communicating.
Threaded throughout these assumptions about women and leadership are facets of communication theories including communication accommodation theory, face negotiation theory, standpoint theory, muted group theory, and co-cultural theory.
COMMUNICATION ACCOMMODATION THEORY
At its core, Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) suggests that people adapt their communication depending on their present circumstances to either become more similar to the person they are interacting with or to accentuate their differences. Individuals adjust their speech, or make an accommodation, to gain the approval of their listener through convergence, or to emphasize their distinctiveness from their listener through divergence. This theory is especially foundational to my project’s aim of providing women resources on leadership and communication styles that they can adopt to become more effective leaders. When it comes to practicing a new form of leadership, women will need adapt the ways they communicate with their direct reports, their supervisors, and their colleagues through a variety of convergent or divergent strategies such as discourse management, using slang, adding emphasis by exaggerating or changing the rate of their speech.
FACE NEGOTIATION THEORY
Face negotiation theory asserts that a person’s cultural background and the ways they perceive themselves in a relational situation impacts the ways they respond to conflict in communication. According to Stella Ting-Toomey (2005), individuals navigate conflict through a process called facework, which is the specific verbal and nonverbal messages they use to maintain or improve the position of their projected self-image, or “face,” in relation to their power distance with others. The theory holds that people who come from an individualistic culture, such as that of the United States or Western Europe, have a more independent self-image and will prioritize the preservation of their own self-face when engaged in conflict. By contrast, individuals from collectivistic cultures, like those of Latin America or East Asia, have a more interdependent self-image and respond to conflict by preserving the other-face, or that of their opposition. Face negotiation theory has an implicit influence on this project, which is rooted in assumption that women who are exploring different leadership styles are faced with conflict and are striving to try new strategies for navigating conflict in the workplace.
STANDPOINT THEORY
The focus of standpoint theory is on the ways that gender, race, and class affect an individual’s position in society and how that location shapes their life, guiding what they know, what they feel, and what they do. Standpoint theory holds that the marginalized groups can uniquely understand how society works because of their exclusion from the cultural center. Women, racial minority groups, LGBTQ, and under resourced communities can offer a less biased perspectives on institutional and social systems because they have developed communication skills, attitudes, and ways of thinking due to their lack of access to the privilege that is afforded to those who occupy positions of power. Standpoint theory helps underscore the need to collate resources designed specifically for women seeking to develop their leadership skills, as my project will, since they have been historically excluded from leadership roles in the workplace.
MUTED GROUP THEORY
Muted group theory suggests that language excludes and silences women from public discourse. According to this theory, women must translate their perspectives so they may be understood within the lexicon of their male audience. McKenzie and Halstead (2017) point out how detrimental this phenomenon is for women attempting to take on leadership positions in the workplace, since they are generally excluded from the process of forming organizational communication norms and are subsequently faced with the challenge of expressing themselves through language practices that are by and for men. Given that the goal of muted group theory is to change the linguistic system that silences women and perpetuates sexist terminology, this project attempts to give women a vocabulary of leadership styles that empowers their success.
CO-CULTURAL THEORY
Co-cultural theory examines the ways in which members of minority groups such as Black, LGBTQ, and disabled people overcome their marginalization by the dominant culture by adopting a specific communication orientation. Drawing from standpoint and muted-group theory, co-cultural theory describes the ways in which co-cultural group members achieve their goals of assimilating, accommodating, or separating themselves within the dominant group culture though nonassertive, assertive, or aggressive communication approaches. When the three goals are analyzed against the three approaches, nine distinct communication orientations emerge. Although this project does not delve deeply into the specifics of each communication orientation described by co-cultural theory, it is important to acknowledge the ways in which women—especially women of color and disabled women—employ the verbal and nonverbal communication strategies like mirroring, confronting, or censoring self that this theory highlights.
POPULAR PUBLICATIONS
Along with the scholarly and theoretical lenses that are helping shape my approach to communication, leadership, gender, and culture in this project, it is important to underscore that this project is also grounded in popular print and digital content about female leadership and career development that includes self-help books, online articles, listicles, documentaries, and TED Talks. Sheryl Sandberg’s (2013) Lean In and Marissa Orr’s (2019) response, Lean Out, present two contrasting perspectives on women in the workplace. These, coupled with bell hooks’ (2015) critique “Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In,” and Colleen Ammerman and Boris Groysberg’s (2021) Glass Half-Broken help illustrate that there are a variety of barriers and entry points for women who aspire to lead. I draw from these sources as well as digital articles and listicles like Indeed’s (2023) “8 Common Leadership Styles (Plus How To Find Your Own)” because they are written for a broad audience and because they are published on widely accessible digital platforms that women might come across in their casual internet research on leadership strategies.
EXPLORE THE CAPSTONE
REFERENCES
Ammerman, C., & Groysberg, B. (2021). Glass half-broken: Shattering the barriers that still hold women back at work. Harvard Business Review Press.
Ammerman, C., & Groysberg, B. (2021, May-June). How to close the gender gap. Harvard Business Review, 99(3), 124–133.
Ashkenas, R. & Manville, B. (2019, April 4). You don’t have to be CEO to be a visionary leader. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/04/you-dont-have-to-be-ceo-to-be-a-visionary-leader
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