Communication ETDs

Publication Date

12-9-1976

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to compare the communicative behavior of democratic male and democratic female leaders. Subjects were selected from a body of students in introductory communication classes who completed the Sargent and Miller Leadership Questionnaire. Ten males and ten females, identified as democratic leaders, participated as leaders of small groups composed of two male and two female group members who scored in the middle range on the Sargent and Miller instrument.

Each group discussed a hypothetical case study, "The Betty Case," for fifteen minutes as two observers recorded the communicative behavior of the democratic leaders according to Bales Interaction Process Analysis. This system was used to classify the communicative acts of each democratic leader in six task and six socio-emotional categories of interaction. The mean percentages of the total communicative behavior for democratic male leaders and democratic female leaders were compared for statistically significant differences in each of the twelve categories in order to answer the research question: What differences exist in the communicative behavior of democratic male and democratic female leaders? Twelve z tests were computed and compared to the critical value of z computed by the Bonferroni procedure.

The single statistically significant difference between the communicative behavior of democratic male and democratic female leaders that was observed in this study was for Bales category ten (Disagrees); male democratic leaders disagree more than female democratic leaders. The results may indicate that of all sex differences which may be predicted from the literature, only disagreement remains as a salient differentiating behavior between female and male democratic leaders. It appears that the variable of sex is not as potent as the variable of leadership style in determining leader behavior.

Future research should attempt to control for the influence of social sex roles on the behavior of democratic male and democratic female leaders by varying the sex composition of the groups: males and females may behave differently with members of the same or members of the opposite sex. Conformity to social sex roles should also be investigated across age groups in order to measure the stability of communicative behavioral patterns of male and female democratic leaders. Variations in the difficulty, sex relatedness and degree of ambiguity of the group task might elicit different types of leader communicative behaviors. Studies incorporating these different group tasks should be con­ducted in order to determine the consistency of behaviors for democratic male and democratic female group leaders.

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Communication

Department Name

Department of Communication and Journalism

First Committee Member (Chair)

Lawrence Bernard Rosenfeld

Second Committee Member

Dodd Harvey Bogart

Third Committee Member

Paul C. Feingold

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