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On the effectiveness of elected male and female leaders and team coordination

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Abstract

We study the effect on coordination in a minimum-effort game of a leader’s gender depending on whether the leader is democratically elected or is randomly selected. Leaders use non-binding messages to try to convince followers to coordinate on the Pareto-efficient equilibrium. We find that teams with elected leaders coordinate on higher effort levels. Initially, the benefits of being elected are captured solely by male leaders. However, this gender difference disappears with repeated interaction because unsuccessful male leaders are reelected more often than unsuccessful female leaders.

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Notes

  1. Ertac and Gurdal (2012) demonstrate that female leaders make less risky decisions when making risky decisions for their team.

  2. For evidence that widely held gender stereotypes affect behavior in experiments, even when they do not hold in the laboratory see Reuben et al. (2014) and Bohnet et al. (2016).

  3. In the context of cooperation, Levy et al. (2011) show that messages from democratically elected leaders have a bigger impact on contributions to a public good game than those of randomly selected leaders. More generally, there is a growing body of work showing that institutions are more effective if they are democratically-chosen (Dal Bó 2014).

  4. Even though followers do not select their leaders in many organizations, they are often consulted by those that do.

  5. Dufwenberg et al. (2005) study differences in coordination (without leaders) depending on the fraction of men and women in a team. Other papers study gender differences in leading by example in public good games. For example, Arbak and Villeval (2013) find that men and women are equally likely to lead as long as the leaders’ gender is visible.

  6. Brandts et al. (2015) use majority voting. We decided to use the Borda count because it generally elects leaders who have broad support within the team rather than the favorite of a simple majority.

  7. Ordered probit regression for effort and OLS regression for earnings, both using treatment × leader’s gender dummy variables (see Table A2 in online Appendix).

  8. Probit regressions of the participants’ decision to become a candidate on their own gender (see Table A10 in online Appendix). In the online Appendix, we show that participants initially nominate themselves too often but over time converge to nomination rates consistent with a simple theoretical framework with risk-neutral players (see Tables A10, A11, and Figure A2 in online Appendix).

  9. Unlike papers that study entry into tournaments (Niederle and Vesterlund 2011), we do not find that women shy away from becoming candidates. The reason might be that participants think that nominating themselves benefits others as gender differences in tournament entry have been shown to diminish when individuals compete for their team (Healy and Pate 2011).

  10. In Random, 10 teams were randomly assigned a male leader and 5 teams a female leader.

  11. Probit regression for coordination on the highest effort and OLS regression for earnings. Both regressions use treatment × leader’s gender dummy variables (see Table A4 in online Appendix). These results are robust to using team averages as the units of observation or running the regressions solely with data from period 9 (see Table A4-R in online Appendix).

  12. In Timko (2017) we present a detailed analysis of the messages’ content that demonstrates that explicitly asking for the highest effort is the only type of message that varies between treatments and predicts team coordination.

  13. Male vs. female leaders in Election (\(p = 0.104\)) and in Random (\(p = 0.353\)). Election vs. Random among male (\(p = 0.450\)) and female (\(p = 0.751\)) leaders. Probit regression with treatment × leader’s gender dummy variables (see Table A4 in online Appendix).

  14. Male vs. female leaders in Election (\(p = 0.004\) for coordination, \(p = 0.041\) for effort) and in Random (\(p = 0.481\), for coordination, \(p = 0.364\) for effort). Election vs. Random among male (\(p < 0.001\), for coordination, \(p = 0.001\) for effort) and female (\(p = 0.418\), for coordination, \(p = 0.266\) for effort) leaders. Since followers react only when the leader asks for the highest effort, we use probit regressions with sample selection based on the type of message sent and treatment × leader’s gender dummy variables (see Table A5 in online Appendix).

  15. Belief elicitation was not incentivized. Participants simply self-reported their beliefs in the first period of each leadership term. See the online Appendix for details.

  16. Probit regressions with sample selection based on the type of message sent and leader’s gender × preference for the leader’s gender dummy variables (see Table A6 in online Appendix).

  17. Election vs. Random among male (coordination: \(p = 0.001\); earnings: \(p = 0.017\)) and female (coordination: \(p = 0.036\); earnings: \(p = 0.063\)) leaders. Male vs. female leaders in Election (coordination: \(p = 0.769\); earnings: \(p = 0.718\)) and in Random (coordination \(p = 0.615\); earnings: \(p = 0.510\) in Random). Same regressions as footnote 11 (see Table A4 in online Appendix).

  18. Election vs. Random among male (\(p = 0.011\)) and female (\(p = 0.115\)) leaders. Same regressions as footnote 13 (see Table A4 in online Appendix).

  19. Probit regressions with dummy variables identifying, for the previous three periods, the gender and race of the leader and whether the team was successful or unsuccessful (see Table A7 in online Appendix). Since it is possible that unobserved team characteristics explain the interaction between the leader’s gender, team success, and the probability of reelection, we also ran regressions including team fixed effects. We obtain very similar results.

  20. Probit regressions of being a leader on gender (see Table A8 in online Appendix). A similar pattern is observed in Random but the gender differences are not statistically significant.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded with the faculty research funds of Columbia University (No. ID0ENSAE1241).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

    Ernesto Reuben

  2. University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Krisztina Timko

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  1. Ernesto Reuben
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  2. Krisztina Timko
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Correspondence to Ernesto Reuben.

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Reuben, E., Timko, K. On the effectiveness of elected male and female leaders and team coordination. J Econ Sci Assoc 4, 123–135 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40881-018-0056-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40881-018-0056-3

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