The Effectiveness of Charismatic Signaling by Gender: a Prospective Meta-Analytic Review

While charismatic leadership tactics (CLTs) have been validated across a variety of settings and shown to improve leadership evaluations and predict follower behaviors, the role gender may play in charismatic leadership has been understudied. The present investigation assesses the influence of leader gender as well as a host of contextual variables on the efficacy of CLTs in influencing follower evaluations of leaders as well as follower prosocial behavior. Using signaling theory as an organizing framework, I examine critical moderators of the charismatic effect and integrate gender as a signal that may influence the efficacy of charismatic signaling. Through four independent experimental studies, which I conducted and then meta-analyzed, this paper identifies that the relationships between charismatic signaling, leader gender, and contextual moderators are nuanced and complex. I found a moderate main effect for charisma such that charismatic signaling did result in more positive follower evaluations (d = .185, k = 4, n = 1,002) and increased prosocial donation behavior (d = .1308, k = 4, n = 1,002), but the meta-analytic results revealed an interaction, such that these effects were often stronger for women than for men (e.g., attributed charisma d = .271 for women compared to d = .1342 for men). Furthermore, I found a main effect of gender for influence (d = .158, k = 4, n = 1,002) and donation behavior (d = .1142, k = 4, n = 1,002) favoring women, but this gender difference was reduced or disappeared entirely when the leader engaged in costly signaling behavior (influence d = .08, 95% CI = [-.0353 - .2147], k = 4, n = 1,002) or held only informal authority (influence d = .115, 95% CI = [-.0592 - .2886], k = 4, n = 1,002). Future directions and the need for a more nuanced theory of charismatic signaling are discussed.