Integrating the CADDIS Model of Agency and the SPACE Model of Communality to Explain Penalties and Rewards for Agentic Women in Leadership
Assessments of agentic perceptions are central to gender and leadership research. However, there is ambiguity about the definition, content, and structure of agency. Based on a review of how agency has been operationalized in the gender and leadership literature over the past 44 years, I developed and validated a new six-factor model of agency, CADDIS (i.e., Competent agency, Ambitious agency, Dominant agency, Diligent agency, Independent agency, and Self-assured agency). I found that the CADDIS model of agency led to a different understanding of past conclusions—an agentic advantage occurred when women were perceived to possess competent agency, diligent agency, and independent agency, and an agentic disadvantage occurred when women were perceived to possess dominant agency. I will also discuss an ongoing project about the SPACE (i.e., Self-sacrificing, Passive-Aggressive, Compassionate, and Ethical) model of communality, its relationship with agency, and implications for gender and leadership.
Anyi Ma
Dr. Anyi Ma is an Assistant Professor of Management at Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her PhD in Management from Duke University, Fuqua School of Business. She researches how other people perceive agentic employees and the effects these perceptions have on gender and leadership. She also examines how employees experience agency, such as having choice and control and the wide-ranging – and often counter-intuitive – consequences of these experiences. Anyi’s work has been published in Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, American Psychologist, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Naval Research Logistics, and The Leadership Quarterly.