On being a bright and ambitious woman: Four voices from upper management.

Abstract

Positivistic approaches to human behavior assume a dualistic subjective self isolated from an objective world out there. Thinking about existence this way has caused the social sciences, and psychology in particular, to focus on epistemology rather than on ontology to study human functioning. This study presents a phenomenological, social constructionist perspective based on the ontological thinking of Heidegger, Vygotsky, and Bakhtin (HVB) to show how human experience and the sense people make of their lives is grounded in the nonmental, cultural situatedness of everyday practices, mediated by voice, or the speaking consciousness. This HVB perspective is used to explore the experience of being bright and ambitious for four women managers in various large for-profit service industries. A multimethod, postpositivistic approach was followed which included semi-structured individual interviews, observational coding of the women's management teams in meetings held in the EDS Center for Advanced Research Capture Laboratory, and administration of Seligman's Explanatory Style Questionnaire (ESQ) to the women, their teams, their parents and immediate families. Because of the exploratory nature of the study, theory was allowed to emerge from the data. The most salient finding was the multivoicedness of the women's narratives, which revealed the dialogic influence of others in their lives, especially those who had power over them in their childhoods. This finding was borne out by results of the ESQ, which showed that the women's explanatory styles were most similar to their mothers' styles. Yet each woman also had a strong male, either a father or brother, in her childhood. ESQ results also showed that sex-role differences in experience resulted in significant differences in male and female attributions. Observational coding data revealed the women's meeting leadership styles to be assured, supportive, and less directive than men's. Overall, the study supported a nondualistic HVB construal of self and world by showing how being unfolds through moment-to-moment involvement with things and other people within a socially shared background of common sense skills and practices.