Most of us would like to impress the people we work with. But new research from Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Alexandra Feldberg finds that, for women managers, this aspiration can undermine performance.
Feldberg discovered that women managers in a grocery chain prioritized tasks done in front of direct reports to demonstrate competence and combat negative stereotypes about their abilities. But, these displays came at the expense of less visible office work that is critical to their businesses’ performance. Her research coins the term “task bind” to describe the dilemma: Sometimes, trying to prove yourself in one task takes away time from doing other important tasks.
“Women experience the fear that people are going to think they’re not good at, competent in, or capable in their roles.”
Especially women who believe that their authority is precarious feel pressure to demonstrate their capabilities before an audience. But this can be dangerous: Feldberg found that when women put off private office tasks such as strategic planning or data analysis, their departments’ profits and customer service ratings decline. When women prioritize public tasks on the floor—shelving, slicing meat, baking bread—they show that they’re willing to roll up their sleeves, but this behavior could be costly to their businesses’ bottom lines.
By looking at the everyday activities of women managers, Feldberg’s research offers new clues as to why women’s careers tend to stall in middle management, and why men tend to be promoted to upper management sooner. About 40 percent of managers are women, and their representation shrinks to just 26 percent of the C-suite, according to McKinsey. The paper’s findings also emerge as remote and hybrid work risk obscuring women’s contributions.
“Women experience the fear that people are going to think they’re not good at, competent in, or capable in their roles. They’re trying to perform for an audience to disprove negative stereotypes, which constrains their behavior,” Feldberg says.
Grocery stores offer ideal window
Feldberg used a combination of observations, interviews, and archival data in The Task Bind: Explaining Gender Differences in Managerial Tasks and Performance, recently published in Administrative Science Quarterly, to analyze 80 retail grocery stores employing more than 8,000 people over two years. Fewer than 15 percent of these stores had women store managers.
Grocery stores offer fertile ground for research overall: The US grocery industry employed more than 4 million workers in 2019, and the retail trades employed more than 15 percent of the country’s working population in 2018. The physical layout of the stores is also clearly divided between public- and private-facing spaces: the floor, where people shop, and the office.
By analyzing three years of records from company databases, Feldberg found that women prioritized tasks on the floor over those in the office—and doing fewer tasks in the office was negatively associated with their departments’ performance.
Implications beyond retail and gender
While Feldberg’s research focused on a bricks-and-mortar grocery chain, its findings apply to other fields. Women engineering managers, concerned that subordinate engineers could question their technical skills, might spend more time checking the accuracy of their teams’ work instead of devising budgets. Women scientists might focus more on interacting with students and staff instead of writing grants or working with donors.
In essence, the task bind reflects how people’s concerns about negative stereotypes can shape their allocation of attention—and, therefore, their work performance.
“Managing people’s impressions—thinking about how people view you because you need to get subordinates to follow your directives—is a huge part of a manager’s job.”
“Given women’s increasing representation in managerial ranks and the links between tasks and performance, understanding gender differences in managers’ daily practices will have far-reaching consequences,” she says. “The task bind is a novel way to think about pervasive interpersonal dynamics, because beliefs influence day-to-day work behaviors and performance, and the bind is likely to apply even beyond gender—to anyone who feels threatened by a negative stereotype.”
Feldberg’s research also shows how women manage their image for lower-ranked employees. Usually, research focuses on how employees try to impress superiors.
“Managing people’s impressions—thinking about how people view you because you need to get subordinates to follow your directives—is a huge part of a manager’s job. However, the vast majority of research tends to focus on how women are evaluated from people above them as opposed to people below them,” Feldberg explains.
Fixing the impression management problem
Feldberg urges managers to be aware of these invisible pressures and for supervisors to hire more women into managerial roles, which reduces this behavior. She found that gender differences in office tasks decreased as women managers worked with more women in comparable roles.
“One finding in the study is that, when women managers have more women peers in male-dominated parts of the business—in this case, meat or produce—you actually see that it lessens the effect of the task bind. This might help to lessen concerns with negative stereotypes, which are what’s driving the bind,” she says.
“This is not about being capable or talented. It’s more a constraint that is completely understandable.”
Meanwhile, women’s neglect of office tasks and resulting financial underperformance was more pronounced when they worked in gender-imbalanced departments, where negative gender stereotypes were more likely to prevail. “This is not about being capable or talented. It’s more a constraint that is completely understandable,” Feldberg says.
While widespread stereotypes contribute to the bind, Feldberg suggests individuals can take steps to manage it by logging their daily activities and practicing intentionality when budgeting their time. “Ask yourself: ‘Am I doing a task for a reason related to impression management, and is it that important?’” she says.
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Image: iStockphoto/Drazen Zigic
