ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1544411
Female Motivation to Lead: The Impact of Same-Sex Role Models and Female Leadership Strength Awareness
Provisionally accepted
- University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany
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Introduction -Research on motivation to lead (MTL) suggests that women tend to be less motivated to take on leadership positions than men. By investigating female motivation to lead, we want to contest this finding.Methods -We used five samples for validating our newly specified constructs (i.e., prosocial MTL and female leadership strength awareness) in Study 1 and a further sample of 248 students in Study 2.Results -First, we propose a reconceptualization of MTL by introducing prosocial MTL as a fourth MTL type. We demonstrate that women have higher levels of prosocial MTL and noncalculative MTL, while men have higher levels of affective-identity MTL and social normative MTL. Second, we show that women are more strongly motivated to lead if they a) have same-sex role models and b) are aware of female strengths in leadership.Discussion -We conclude that female motivation to lead is not necessarily lower than male motivation to lead but rather different in nature, and that it can be further enhanced by factors that seem particularly relevant for women.
Keywords: Female leadership, female leadership strength awareness, gender, Motivation to lead, prosocial motivation to lead, same-sex role models
Received: 12 Dec 2024; Accepted: 14 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Boerner, Schwarzmaier and Tagos. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Sabine Boerner, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany
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