Virus for Women Employees: Exploring the Stereotypical Beliefs of the Leaders about their Female Followers

The never-ending gender discrimination in societies needs multidimensional exploration to understand its causes. Gender stereotyping has remained one of the foremost causes of gender discrimination in the workplace. This study strived to explore the stereotypical thinking and beliefs about women employees in the minds of their office leaders and discusses how these stereotypes play role in management of talent and performance of female employees. With the qualitative approach, this study has used hermeneutic phenomenology as the method of exploration. The data was collected with purposive sampling from managerial leaders, working in private companies whose followers include women employees. Nineteen in-depth interviews were conducted with a question designed from theory, expert and construct validity. The data were analyzed with multi-level coding and thematic analysis. The results revealed that managerial leaders have work-related, family-related and personal stereotypes about their female followers. They generalize that women employees are less ambitious, less professional, over occupied an emotional. They believe that they feel need to micromanage the females as they require more guidance. Those organizations that believe to maintain the diversity in employees should regularly organize training sessions to neutralize the stereotypes in the minds of their managers so that they could not hamper the progression of their female followers.   Keywords: Stereotypical Beliefs; Female Followers; Leadership; Organizational Behavior