The research paper attempts to analyze empirical studies conducted to understand psychology of women in management roles, especially in relation to the concept of “Queen Bees” as defined by G.L. Staines, T.E. Jayaratne, and C. Tavris in 1973 as senior women who treat other women subordinates more “critically”.
The study uses a series of narratives to discover subtle nuances of the struggle that women may face in their attempt to reach the higher echelons in their organizations – especially negative relations that women may develop in their gender- both at a junior level as well as when a woman is at the leadership position and hence be called a queen bee.
Understanding the research methodology of the paper
The author has adopted a qualitative…show more content… One study attempted to understand the experiences of senior women in the housing sector in the UK (Mavin and Lockwood, 2004) while the other was a research exploring the identity and position of female academians in a business school (Mavin,2001b). The author justifies the use of these studies since both use biographical semi structured interview method that enable formation of relevant narratives in way that the subjects are able to express their honest thoughts without pertaining to social desirability of the answers (one of the issues in the survey method) as well align with the feminist lens that she wants to apply in order to arrive at the core issues that plague relations among women in management. Also, unlike using a Likert scale in the quantitative method, subjects are able to support their responses with examples and adjectives which make the narratives more…show more content… Analysis of the story to arrive at certain themes- in this case plausible reasons that women attribute to their success and the dilemma they face in being viewed as belonging to the female gender, role incongruity issues etc.
5. The author relied on a collaborative approach to arrive at the final narratives – she shared the transcripts with the participants for further thoughts and also engaged with others who held critical and feminist view to interpret the narratives
6. The nature of the narratives imply that the author was able to successfully interact with these women at a personal level- a hallmark of qualitative studies- to be able to reveal hitherto relatively un explored role dynamics and provide an indepth study of women’s negative relationship , while other studies talk about the behavioral characteristics of the queen bee , this study was able to clearly spell out the thoughts, experience and plausible reasons for a woman in a management role to behave in a certain manner
7. Overall, the study follows an overall inductive approach- the author gathers data to build concepts and theories rather than deductively testing any
