Gendered Networking: Gender, Environment, and Managerial Networking

This article examines how gender influences top managers' networking activities and what situational factors intensify or ameliorate such gender effects. Focusing on female top managers' efforts to engage in external networking activities, the authors conceptualize how and why female managers might develop different networking patterns and how such relationships could be redirected by several contingent factors specific to the context of U.S. local school districts. Using three sets of surveys on managerial behavior and management styles supplemented with six years of information related to organizational contexts, the authors find that, in general, gender differences lead to corresponding differences in the extent of involvement in managerial networking. Such effects are moderated by situational factors that impede or facilitate the number of available strategic managerial choices that allow managers to cope with them. The findings emphasize the need to consider the strengths and weaknesses of gender conjointly in assessing networking behaviors.