It is also important to note that this tendency toward collaboration might comes at a price. Women who are socialized as Chodorow postulates, might face the problem of establishing boundaries in their work life and in their home life. They might confront the issue of workaholism and an unbounded sense of responsibility. I worked with a female CEO several years ago who often pointed to research indicating that male CEOs in the contemporary world are usually able to set aside their weekends for family, while the female CEOs would be more likely to bring their work home and try to balance or blend work and family. Though the traditional stereotype is of the man who lives only for his work, my female CEO client talked about the greater struggle today for women to live only for their work or living with the myth that they can do everything well (as “superwoman”). While work-life balance might be a major challenge for women who have not established clear boundaries, this lack of boundary definitions and orientation toward collaboration might also provide the answer: these superwomen might be more inclined than their male colleagues to turn to other people for assistance in dealing with the work/life challenge—unless they have bought into the male orientation toward individual achievement.
I wish to dig a bit deeper into the dynamics of collaboration and the role of gender. There may be a physiological basis for the differences in social orientation of men and women. While men (especially in their youth) tend to be saturated with testosterone (which often tends to activate an aggressive and competitive orientation), women (especially during the child-rearing years) tend to be saturated with oxytocin and other hormones (which tend to active an orientation toward bonding and nurturance). (Brizendine, 2008) While we need to be careful about over-generalizations and about the overemphasis on neurobiological origins of behavior, it is important to keep these hormonal differences in mind—especially when considering members of organizations under stress (when these bio-chemical factors tend to be even more influential).
We find yet another important factor related to the differences between men and women in their orientation toward collaboration: women have often been socialized in Western societies as contextual epistemologists (that is as people who tend to think and reason by considering specific issues within their specific setting or context). As Carol Gilligan (1982) and Mary Belenky and her colleagues (1986) have observed, women tend to look at specific issues within the specific context surrounding the issue, whereas men (at least European/American White men) tend to look at specific issues in terms of abstract principles that are applied to understanding and resolving the issue. This would suggest that women tend either to be influenced as leaders and team members by the context in which they are working and making decisions, or they tend to be more effective than men in working in and leading in settings that are complex and challenging with regard to context. It also means that women are more likely than men to feel comfortable in working collaboratively—which is a much more complex environment in which to work than that of autonomous, isolated work. It also may mean that the sharing of information and the promotion of collective intelligence is more important for many women, given the value they place on identifying and analyzing the environment and context in which they are operating—information that is typically only available from multiple sources and validated only from multiple perspectives.
