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1. Introduction
According to “The World's Women 2020: Trends and Statistics”, only 28% of managerial positions, globally, were held by women in 2019. Female leaders are still far underrepresented in most organizations, partly because they are expected to be feminine as a woman and meanwhile masculine as a leader (Carli and Eagly, 2011). Due to this role expectation incongruence, female leaders often provoke negative responses no matter they display the gender role of masculinity or femininity (Heilman and Okimoto, 2007). Despite abundant research on the backlash effect on female leaders (Rudman et al., 2012), it remains to be seen whether competence could override negative affective responses incurred by the double bind in female leadership. Extant research on role congruity theory maintains that women who are derogated by subordinates cannot be effective leaders even when they are highly competent (Casciaro and Lobo, 2008; Dwivedi et al., 2021; Eagly and Karau, 2002). By demonstrating their competence, women elicit lower warmth evaluations in a way that men who demonstrate competence do not (Cuddy et al., 2011). However, other research argues that competence is a primary predictor of leader effectiveness (Margarida et al., 2021), whereas subordinates' affective responses to leaders are of little importance for leader effectiveness (Vial and Napier, 2018).
The controversial role of leader competence versus subordinates' affective responses in predicting female leader effectiveness may result from two limitations in the literature. First, few studies have clearly differentiated perceived competence from actual competence when examining the role of competence in leader effectiveness. As people's attitudes are determined by their perceptions of the world (Bligh et al., 2012), leader competence perceived by the subordinates would be a more critical predictor of leadership outcomes. Second, the potential influence of perceived competence on affective responses to gender roles has been overlooked because competence was mainly examined as the outcome of gender role perceptions (Carli and Eagly, 2011; Martin and Slepian, 2021). Hence we aim to address the controversial role of competence in explaining women's leader effectiveness by focusing on perceived leader competence and its effect on subordinates' affective responses to leaders' gender roles. Specifically, we examine whether perceived leader competence interacts with gender roles and sex to trigger the affective mechanism, which in turn leads...