Gender, Bottom-Line Mentality, and Workplace Mistreatment: The Roles of Gender Norm Violation and Team Gender Composition

Although gender has been identified as an important antecedent in workplace mistreatment research, empirical research has shown mixed results. Drawing on role congruity theory, we propose an interactive effect of gender and bottom-line mentality on being the target of mistreatment. Across two field studies, our results showed that whereas women experienced more mistreatment when they had higher levels of bottom-line mentality, men experienced more mistreatment when they had lower levels of bottom-line mentality. In another field study, using round-robin survey data, we found that team gender composition influenced the degree to which the adoption of a bottom-line mentality by female team members was perceived to be a gender norm violation, which subsequently predicted their likelihood of being mistreated. Specifically, women who had higher (vs. lower) levels of bottom-line mentality were more likely to be perceived to violate gender norms in teams with a lower proportion of women, and in turn, perceived gender norm violation was positively associated with being mistreated. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our findings and directions for future research.