Promoting Healthy Leader-Follower Dynamics to Enhance Workplace Equality

Abstract

For five decades literature and research has exposed the entrenched and enduring factors that reproduce inequality in workplaces and offered effective methods to address it. However, inequality in pay status and opportunity continues, most noticeably for the targeted equity groups of women, people from non-English-speaking backgrounds, people with disabilities and people with LGBT orientations. The complex structural factors that reproduce inequality in organizations are so entrenched that they have formed 'inequality regimes' (Acker, Gend Soc 20(4): 441-464, 2006) that are highly resistant to change. Leaders can negotiate and change these gendered spaces for the better, and a healthy leader-follower dynamic is part of that solution. More leaders need to have transformational leadership qualities in order to challenge stereotypical biases against women, the practice of 'homo-sociability' in management and the structures that reproduce 'inequality regimes' within organizations. Progress toward equity has stalled since the 1990s due to the strengthening of perceptual biases against women, the lack of government programs to address gender inequity and the practice of devolving responsibility for Equal Employment Opportunity programs to a 'managing diversity' process within human resources departments. Leaders and followers can either participate in the continuation of inequality by allowing inequality regimes to continue or work for change by adopting a more inclusive and transformational leadership style and implementing the recommendations for change to improve equity. The chapter will discuss the characteristics of a healthy leader-follower dynamic that is open and authentic and focuses on merit, fairness and transparency in order to foster and enhance workplace equality. Recommendations for a 'Charter for Equity' that leaders can follow to bring about workplace equality will also be discussed.