- Department of Psychology
Bar-Ilan University
Ramat Gan
Israel 5290000
Ronit Kark
Bar-Ilan University, Psychology and Gender Studies, Faculty Member
- Positive Psychology, Leadership, Gender in Organizations, Mentoring, Women Leadership, Gender Studies, and 24 moreGender and Leadership, Positive Organizational Scholarship, Emotions in Organizations, Management, Management of Innovation, Creativity, Play, נשים מנהלות, מנהיגות נשים, מיגדר, תקרת הזכוכית, נשים וניהול, תיאוריה פמיניסטית, נשים והשפעה, כח, ניתוח םמיניסטי, ניתוח ביקורתי, נשים באירגונים, Paradoxes, Women and Gender Studies, Creative Leadership, Self and Identity, Identity, and Social Identityedit
- Full Professor of Leadership and Organisational Studiesedit
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While many aspects of the leader–follower relationship have been studied, we know very little about the role of leader–follower distance in relationships and organizations. In particular, we propose to go beyond the current definition and... more
While many aspects of the leader–follower relationship have been studied, we know very little about the role of leader–follower distance in relationships and organizations. In particular, we propose to go beyond the current definition and examine distance as malleable and enacted by leaders. We explore this as acts of “doing distance” via two studies. In the first, we utilized the Critical Incident Technique to collect events of enacted distance from 97 managers working in diverse sectors and organizations. Drawing on the qualitative findings, we develop a conceptual model of the context, goals, and behavioral practices of enacted distance. In the second study ( N = 543), we tested the proposed model using an experimental manipulation to examine the role of identity processes and levels (individual, relational, and collective) in leaders’ doing distance. We identify specific managerial practices of doing distance and their related antecedents in terms of individuals’ experiences and relationships, and discuss implications for theory and practice regarding distance in leader–follower relationships.
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Research Interests: Sociology and Negotiation
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Why do women receive equal or better performance ratings than men in managerial assessment centers even when they are structured in ways that systematically disadvantage them? This study provides the first attempt to understand this... more
Why do women receive equal or better performance ratings than men in managerial assessment centers even when they are structured in ways that systematically disadvantage them? This study provides the first attempt to understand this managerial assessment center gender paradox using in-depth interviews with managerial assessment center evaluators for a large semi-military governmental organization. The study revealed that the managerial assessment center was a gendered environment in which organizational practices, language used, and the underlying logic establish and reinforce men as assertive or protectors and women as weak and in need of protection. In accordance with the managerial assessment center gender paradox, women were successful at the managerial assessment center despite systemic bias against them. Interpretive analysis revealed that women candidates generate discomfort that evaluators alleviate by increased attention to the extent to which they conform to gender ideolog...
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The papers in this Special Issue Part I “Revisioning, Rethinking, Restructuring Gender at Work: Quo Vadis Gender Stereotypes?” focus on the current state of gender inequality, particularly stereotypes. We present studies showing that... more
The papers in this Special Issue Part I “Revisioning, Rethinking, Restructuring Gender at Work: Quo Vadis Gender Stereotypes?” focus on the current state of gender inequality, particularly stereotypes. We present studies showing that differences in gender stereotypes still exist, confirm disadvantages for women in male‐dominated roles and sectors and when the employment sector is not specified, but also disadvantages for men in female‐dominated roles and sectors. In contrast to this general trend, one paper in Part II of this Special Issue found a preference for women over men as job candidates in their study. Incongruence emerged as a striking common theme to explain these gender differences, whereby some studies focused on the perceived incongruence from the actor's perspective and how external factors contribute to these perceptions, whereas others looked at the perceived incongruence from the observer's perspective. We summarize the papers and briefly discuss the key points of Part I at the end of this editorial.
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This leadership panel symposium will provide students and junior faculty the opportunity to discuss their leadership research in an informal, friendly setting with prominent leadership scholars. The junior scholars are required to submit... more
This leadership panel symposium will provide students and junior faculty the opportunity to discuss their leadership research in an informal, friendly setting with prominent leadership scholars. The junior scholars are required to submit brief research proposals prior to the session, and will be matched with a more senior scholar with similar research interests (not from their home university). At the session, the senior scholars will then discuss these proposals with the 1-3 junior scholars they are matched with, providing insights and suggestions for future research directions. The focus will be on developing theoretical foundations and designing high quality empirical studies. This is a great opportunity for the junior scholars to develop their ideas, and it may even lead to future academic collaborations and foster ongoing meaningful mentoring relationships.
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Leaders and followers relationships are complex and affected by many factors, one that has received little attention in the past is leader-follower distance. Distance influences leaders and followers, high and low power individuals, and... more
Leaders and followers relationships are complex and affected by many factors, one that has received little attention in the past is leader-follower distance. Distance influences leaders and followers, high and low power individuals, and affect the ways they represent information, their attitudes and behavior. This symposium explore the relationship between distance, leadership and power. This symposium has three aims, first exploring followers’ perspective of distance by examining the influence of different dimensions of distance on followers’ preference for leaders’ traits and leadership styles,. Second, this symposium aims to explore the ways in which power affects and shapes individuals’ representation of events and its subsequent outcomes. Last, it aims to explore leaders and followers’ different experiences of distance and resulting behavior and emotions. This symposium includes one conceptual paper, presenting a Social Distance Theory of Power, and four empirical papers that examine different concep...
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This leadership panel symposium will provide students and junior faculty the opportunity to discuss their leadership research in an informal, friendly setting with prominent leadership scholars. The junior scholars are required to submit... more
This leadership panel symposium will provide students and junior faculty the opportunity to discuss their leadership research in an informal, friendly setting with prominent leadership scholars. The junior scholars are required to submit brief research proposals prior to the session, and will be matched with a more senior scholar with similar research interests (not from their home university). At the session, the senior scholars will then discuss these proposals with the 1-3 junior scholars they are matched with, providing insights and suggestions for future research directions. The focus will be on developing theoretical foundations and designing high quality empirical studies. This is a great opportunity for the junior scholars to develop their ideas, and it may even lead to future academic collaborations and foster ongoing meaningful mentoring relationships.
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Research Interests: Creativity and Directive
Women in organizations must grapple with a double‐bind stemming from conflicting expectations toward them to exhibit both competition (per workplace norms) and cooperation (per societal gender‐specific norms), and they often suffer a... more
Women in organizations must grapple with a double‐bind stemming from conflicting expectations toward them to exhibit both competition (per workplace norms) and cooperation (per societal gender‐specific norms), and they often suffer a backlash for conforming to one expectation at the expense of the other. Similarly, different streams of literature offer contrasting accounts of women's competitive attitudes and behavior. This systematic review is the first attempt to integrate research on competition among women in organizations across research disciplines to gain a nuanced insight into the pervasiveness, causes, dynamics, and manifestations of this phenomenon. In doing so, we draw on the wide research pertaining to women's intra‐gender competitive attitudes and behavior in structured competition within organizations, and on relevant intersectionality research that looks at diverse groups of women. We synthesize the research to suggest a paradoxical framework of coopetition (c...
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Research Interests: Sociology and Psychology
Paradoxes ubiquitously exist at different levels of organizations. In this symposium, we focus our attention on the dynamics of paradoxical leadership - how do leaders maintain dynamic balancing in...
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This panel symposium focuses on leadership and followership identity issues and attempts to critically synthesize and conceptually develop research on leader/follower identity processes. Despite th...
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ObjectivesTo investigate whether citizens’ adherence to health-protective non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) during the COVID-19 pandemic is predicted by identity leadership, wherein leaders are perceived to create a sense of shared... more
ObjectivesTo investigate whether citizens’ adherence to health-protective non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) during the COVID-19 pandemic is predicted by identity leadership, wherein leaders are perceived to create a sense of shared national identity.DesignObservational two-wave study. Hypotheses testing was conducted with structural equation modelling.SettingData collection during the COVID-19 pandemic in China, Germany, Israel and the USA in April/May 2020 and four weeks later.ParticipantsAdults in China (n=548, 66.6% women), Germany (n=182, 78% women), Israel (n=198, 51.0% women) and the USA (n=108, 58.3% women).MeasuresIdentity leadership (assessed by the four-item Identity Leadership Inventory Short-Form) at Time 1, perceived shared national identification (PSNI; assessed with four items) and adherence to health-protective NPIs (assessed with 10 items that describe different health-protective interventions; for example, wearing face masks) at Time 2.ResultsIdentity leaders...
Do leaders who build a sense of shared social identity in their teams thereby protect them from the adverse effects of workplace stress? This is a question that the present paper explores by testing the hypothesis that identity leadership... more
Do leaders who build a sense of shared social identity in their teams thereby protect them from the adverse effects of workplace stress? This is a question that the present paper explores by testing the hypothesis that identity leadership contributes to stronger team identification among employees and, through this, is associated with reduced burnout. We tested this model with unique datasets from the Global Identity Leadership Development (GILD) project with participants from all inhabited continents. We compared two datasets from 2016/2017 (n = 5290; 20 countries) and 2020/2021 (n = 7294; 28 countries) and found very similar levels of identity leadership, team identification and burnout across the five years. An inspection of the 2020/2021 data at the onset of and later in the COVID-19 pandemic showed stable identity leadership levels and slightly higher levels of both burnout and team identification. Supporting our hypotheses, we found almost identical indirect effects (2016/2017...
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In this paper we integrate recent theories of motivation and leadership. Drawing on the self-regulatory focus theory and on self-concept based theories of leadership, we develop a conceptual framework proposing that leaders ’ chronic... more
In this paper we integrate recent theories of motivation and leadership. Drawing on the self-regulatory focus theory and on self-concept based theories of leadership, we develop a conceptual framework proposing that leaders ’ chronic self-regulatory focus (promotion versus prevention), in conjunction with their values, influences their mo-tivation to lead and, subsequently, their leadership behavior. We further suggest that leaders may influence the motivational self-regulatory foci of their followers, which will mediate different follower outcomes at the individual and group level. In the last two decades, evidence has accumu-lated that transformational and charismatic leadership is an influential mode of leadership that is associated with high levels of individual and organizational performance (e.g., Dvir, Eden, Avolio, & Shamir, 2002; Lowe, Kroeck, & Sivasubramaniam, 1996). Leadership effective-ness is critically contingent on, and often de-
This quotation, taken from Jobs's interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2003, describes Jobs's view of technology. In his mind, technology was about bringing people closer. This was his purpose and his guide for creating new... more
This quotation, taken from Jobs's interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2003, describes Jobs's view of technology. In his mind, technology was about bringing people closer. This was his purpose and his guide for creating new technologies, both inside and outside ...
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The scientific field of leadership and followership is fast evolving and has seen several interesting developments over recent years. The early heroic views of leadership are slowly turning into more nuanced perspectives, including the... more
The scientific field of leadership and followership is fast evolving and has seen several interesting developments over recent years. The early heroic views of leadership are slowly turning into more nuanced perspectives, including the understanding that leadership and followership are mutually dependent on each other. Likewise, there is a growing awareness that the focus on the positive side of leadership and followership can be fruitfully complemented by a focus on the darker sides of these constructs. According to the latest research plenty of “grey areas” exist, where further insights into leadership and followership are needed. We seek to emphasize the different shades of dark leadership by taking leaders, followers, and their interaction in specific contexts into account. Accordingly, many of the findings presented in this Research Topic align with a deviation away from the idea of the omnipotent leader. Not only leaders’ dark traits such as narcissism and psychopathy, but also followers’ Machiavellianism emerged as hindering factors for positive organizational functioning. Other results presented in this Research Topic will be fruitful to explain what drives leaders towards dark-side behaviors, the consequences of dark-side leader behaviors (e.g., different types of destructive leadership), and how followers respond to them (e.g., follower attributions of perceived abusive supervision). Contributions to this Research Topic are also pushing the boundaries of current theorizing, shedding further light on the “shades of grey," when it comes to the possibly unintended negative consequences of leadership and followership. In sum, the dark sides of leadership and followership are a natural part of an organizational reality that many employees face day in and day out. The aim of this Research Topic is to encourage an integrative view of leadership and followership and their dark sides, for a better understanding of complex organizational systems and implications for better practice
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Abstract This chapter focused on challenges and tensions that characterize leadership in the military context. It aims to identify and analyze key paradoxes that are reflected in this unique setting, while exploring the challenges,... more
Abstract This chapter focused on challenges and tensions that characterize leadership in the military context. It aims to identify and analyze key paradoxes that are reflected in this unique setting, while exploring the challenges, opportunities, and advantages posed by these core paradoxes for leadership. It addresses different types of paradoxes, among them: (a) shared leadership versus hierarchical leadership, (b) flexibility and creativity versus conformity and discipline, (c) complexity and chaos versus simplicity and linearity, (d) hegemonic and prototypical leadership versus leadership of multiple identities, and last (e) distant leadership and exchange relationship versus intimate leadership and communal relationship. For each focal paradox, we uncover the dynamics, processes, management tensions, and possible subsequent outcomes. We suggest that leadership that is able to effectively attend to competing expectations and paradoxical tensions is essential in the current hybrid and complex organizational structure and unique context of the military. The chapter draws on interviews and prior research of leadership in the Israeli military, as well as other global military contexts, to gain a more nuanced understanding of the challenges of modern military leadership.
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Abstract In this chapter, we integrate recent theories on followers’ self-concept and transformational leadership theory in order to develop a conceptual framework for understanding the exceptional and diverse effects transformational... more
Abstract In this chapter, we integrate recent theories on followers’ self-concept and transformational leadership theory in order to develop a conceptual framework for understanding the exceptional and diverse effects transformational leaders may have on their followers. We propose that transformational leaders may influence two levels of followers’ self-concept: the relational and the collective self thus fostering personal identification with the leader and social identification with the organizational unit. Specific leader behaviors that prime different aspects of followers’ self-concepts are identified, and their possible effects on different aspects of followers’ perceptions and behaviors are discussed.