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Open Access Thesis

Keywords

Sex role; Executives -- Psychology;

Abstract

Economic realities, divorce, and the feminist movement have forced or encouraged women to retain their ties with the labor force. Unfortunately, these ties have been strained by accusations of incompetence, negative attitudes concerning affirmative action policies and concern over role conflicts. The issue which emerges is an issue concerning the role performances of women: are women competent in the labor force? Are women more subject to and influenced by role conflict than men? Are women's performances being accurately perceived by their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates? Before any of the questions can be addressed, an in depth analysis of the roles women assume and are surrounded by needs to occur. This study attempted to explore and compare the roles of mother, father, and manager. The Coordinated Management of Meaning, a theory which hypothesizes that man's perception of reality affects and is affected by his enmeshment within different systems, was presented as the theoretical basis for this study. Interviews of a stratified sample of the entire group, engineers from a large midwestern manufacturer, were conducted to formulate a survey which included the most frequently mentioned episodes or tasks individuals involved in the specific role might encounter. The entire sample was then asked to group these episodes on the basis of similarity. The results were analyzed both interpretively and numerically to discover similarities and consequently dissimilarities. The researcher was able to answer the research questions only descriptively and uncovered that: The cluster characteristics for the father archetype were more similar to the manager clusters' characteristics than were the mother archetype's clusters, and the number of episodes per cluster in the father archetype was more similar to the number of episodes per cluster in the manager archetype than was the number of episodes per cluster in the mother archetype. Overall, with this sample, the manager/father archetype linkage was stronger than the manager/mother archetype linkage. Finally, the implications of this study, and descriptive research in general were discussed, as were the advantages and disadvantages of the Coordinated Management of Meaning.

Year of Submission

1982

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Department of Theatre

Department

Department of Speech

Comments

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Date Original

1982

Object Description

1 PDF file (152 pages)

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

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