The examination of women's response against to leadership stereotype threat

In general, stereotype threat literature focuses on the performance and these researches have provided evidence for stereotype threat has negative effect on individuals' performance. However, the evidence for the cognitive, emotional and motivational reactions of individuals to stereotype threat is more limited. Leadership domain is a relatively new study field for stereotype threat. Similar to the literature, there are also limited studies which investigate the effects of stereotype threat related leadership in Turkey. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is exploring the cognitive (implicit gender-leadership beliefs), emotional (negative affect, social state self-esteem) and motivational (leadership aspiration, team membership aspiration, career goal) effects of stereotype threat in leadership domain on women and determining the moderator role of achievement goals (performance-approach goal, performance-avoidance goal) and women centrality in these effects. The sample of the study consists of 161 students from a state university in Istanbul. In this research, a manipulation was used for stereotype threat, additionally the scales of 2X2 Achievement Goal Orientations, Women Centrality, Leadership-Team Membership Aspiration, Career Goals, Positive and Negative Affects, Social State Self-Esteem, and Implicit Gender-Leadership Test were given. In the first part of two-step study, the measurements were taken for moderator variables from participants in the classroom environment. In the second stage, the measurements were taken for dependent variables after the intervention. According to the results of the analysis, the negative affects of the women who were exposed to the stereotype threat were significantly higher than the women in control condition. On the contrary to expectation, the team membership aspirations of women in the threat condition were marginally lower than the women in the control condition. Besides, it was found that the relationship between stereotype threat and leadership aspiration was significantly moderated by performance-approach goal and marginally moderated by performance-avoidance goal. It was also found that the relationship between stereotype threat and social state self-esteem was moderated by women centrality. All these findings were discussed within the context of literature and suggestions were made for future research.