Gender Differences in Preferences for Team Leadership – Change through Experience?

Subjects are stratified by gender and randomly assigned to the treatment condition (leadership position) or to the control condition (team member position). The laboratory experiment investigates the gender difference in the effect of leadership experience on preferences for positions including team leadership.

2022-11-16

2022-12-31

The primary outcome variable is the bid submitted in the application stage in which subjects apply to become a leader.

The following two main hypotheses will be tested:

1) Men in the control condition bid significantly more than women in the control condition.

2) The gender gap in bids is significantly smaller in the treatment condition compared to the control condition.

The main regression will include gender and treatment status as well as an interaction term of gender and treatment status as independent variables. A further specification will control for other observables such as the group’s contribution or the stated willingness to lead.

Stage 1: Subjects play a standard public good game (PGG). The PGG is adapted to the context of interest by adding a communication tool. The treated subjects – the leaders – have the communication power within their groups. Treatment assignment is stratified by gender (please see Randomization Method for more details).

Stage 2: Subjects apply for a position as leader in Stage 3 by submitting bids in a second price sealed bid auction (Vickrey, 1961).

Stage 3: Stage 3 is almost equivalent to Stage 1. The main difference to Stage 1 is that subjects are not randomly assigned to leadership positions, but the assignment will follow the outcomes of Stage 2, the application stage.

During the experiment subjects answer demographic questions and provide survey evidence on e.g., their motivation to lead.

In each stage, subjects receive the same endowment. It will be randomly determined whether subjects’ payment is based on Stages 1 and 2 or on Stages 2 and 3.

The experiment will be conducted in the Cologne Laboratory of Economic Research (CLER). It serves as a pilot study and was programmed using the software oTree (Chen et al., 2016). Subjects will be recruited using ORSEE (Greiner, 2015). The experiment was approved by the ethics committee of the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences (ERC-FMES) of the University of Cologne in September 2022. Subjects are paid according to the rules of the CLER and know that they can withdraw from the experiment at any time.

The final sample will exclude subjects that:

1. quit the experiment before its end;

2. reveal their identity or gender in the chat;

3. answer the questionnaires at the end of the experiment inattentively (i.e., at least one (out of two) quality check item was answered incorrectly).

Stage 1: 

Subjects play a standard public good game (PGG). The PGG is adapted to the context of interest by adding a communication tool, i.e., a free-form chat that can be used to persuade others to contribute to the public good. Before subjects receive information about the experiment, they are asked to provide information on age, gender, occupation, and, if they are students, their field of study. Prior to the first round of the PGG, subjects need to answer control questions about the PGG and are asked to state their belief about their own relative persuasion ability in comparison to other subjects. Then, subjects are randomly assigned to the leadership position (treatment) or the team member position (control). Conditional on the subjects’ role, they are randomly assigned to groups of three which consist of one leader and two team members. Treatment assignment is stratified by gender (please see Randomization Method for more details).

Leaders can chat with both team members simultaneously in two distinct chat rooms. The other subjects can only chat with the team leader but not with the other team member of their group (e.g., Eisenkopf, 2014). The chats close after a predetermined time. Afterwards, subjects state again their belief in their own relative persuasion ability and the degree of self-persuasion (Schwardmann et al., 2022), i.e., how much their own belief is affected by persuading others, will be recorded.

Thereafter, subjects make their contribution decisions. Subsequently, subjects are informed about their group’s overall contribution as well as about their own payoff.  

Stage 2:  

In this stage, subjects participate in an incentive compatible second price sealed bid auction (Vickrey, 1961) to apply for a position as leader in Stage 3. For this purpose, subjects are endowed with an extra budget unrelated to the payoffs they have earned in Stage 1. Subjects will again answer control questions to ensure that they understand the auction.

Stage 3:  

Stage 3 is almost equivalent to Stage 1. Subjects again play the PGG with chats and contributions. Feedback provision is the same as in Stage 1. The main difference is that subjects are not randomly assigned to leadership positions, but the assignment will follow the outcomes of Stage 2, the application stage.

Subjects are then asked to provide survey information on, e.g., reasons for (not) applying to the leader position, their risk preferences, their (non-calculative) motivation to lead (Chan et al., 2012), their willingness to grant and claim the lead (Geissner et al., 2022), their collectivist values (Dorfman & Howell, 1988) and the appropriateness of the length of the chat. The latter information will be used for future experiments.

In each stage, subjects receive the same endowment. It will be randomly determined whether subjects’ payment is based on Stages 1 and 2 or on Stages 2 and 3.

The randomization will be done using the software otree (Chen et al., 2016). An equal number of men and women will be invited to the experiment. Subjects will indicate their current gender in the beginning of the experiment. This information is used to assign all female subjects to one stratum and all male subjects to a second stratum. Subjects who choose the third option (“diverse”) are assigned to the team-member position because the share of potential participants who chose “diverse” when registering for experiments of the CLER is lower than 0.01%. However, it cannot be guaranteed that every person invited will show up which might lead to an unbalanced number of subjects in each stratum. The randomization method takes this into account:

In each stratum, every third subject is assigned to the treatment condition. Thus, ideally, an equal number of male and female subjects is assigned to leadership positions. The leaders are then randomly assigned to two randomly chosen team members. If there is a mismatch in the number of leaders and team members, the subjects who could not be assigned to a group of three will be grouped together. Within this group, one person is randomly chosen to be the leader.

Individual subject

No

The number of clusters is the same as the number of observations (please see below).

The purpose of the experiment is to test the understandability of the instructions as well as to collect first evidence on potential effect sizes. The planned number of participants is 81.

One third of the subjects will be randomly assigned to the treatment condition (i.e. the role as leader).

This pilot study aims at collecting a first indication of potential effect sizes. The main study will be registered including the information found in this study.