Leader–subordinate gender composition and leader empowering behavior

Focusing on gender role theory and the queen bee phenomenon, this study explored the differentiated exchange relationships between leaders and subordinates with different gender composition, and their influence on leader empowering behavior. We collected data from 1,211 subordinates of 286 teams at a Fortune 500 company in China through the questionnaire method. The empirical analysis results showed that the leader–member exchange relationship of the woman leader–woman subordinate composition was lower than that of the man leader–man subordinate composition, which further reduced leader empowering behavior. This study further used man leader–woman subordinate and woman leader–man subordinate compositions as control groups to verify the effectiveness of the queen bee phenomenon. We concluded that the queen bee phenomenon alone does not significantly affect leader empowering behavior, but that the combination of gender stereotypes and queen bee phenomenon has a significant effect.