How Women Leaders’ Identities Coexist Through Public and Private Identity Endorsements

Abstract

The development of a leader identity is considered essential for leadership success. Underlying this identity work is the belief that the social identity of being a leader is positive—something that leaders both privately endorse and want publicly conferred by others. However, this process is complex for women leaders who are simultaneously navigating the identity work of being women in male-dominated leadership positions. We conducted a qualitative investigation of women in senior leadership roles to examine how they construct a leader identity by managing private and public endorsements of both a leader and a female identity. Our results indicate that women leaders engage in leader and gender identity work whereby they actively manage how they privately self-endorse and publicly allow others to endorse their leader and female identities using identity hybridization. In so doing, they mix and recombine elements of both their leader and gender identities to construct a coherent female leader identity. Doing so allows them to benefit from the complementarity of these identities, while mitigating the risks associated with publicly and privately endorsing these two identities in tandem. This approach to identity hybridization allows women leaders to maintain a sense of agency, effectiveness, and authenticity in the face of identity tensions.