Linking the Role of Imposter Syndrome Influencing Women’s Leadership Styles Using PLS- SEM Model

Abstract

This paper aims to establish the impact of imposter syndrome on leadership style of women and highlighting the need for not just gender-neutral organizations and conducive work environment but also address the onset of imposter syndrome early on where women have a tendency of feeling of self-doubt and generally tend to not accept appreciation from any external entity. The purpose of this paper is to address the impact of imposter syndrome on autocratic, democratic and laissez -faire leadership style of women leaders.  We empirically tested a heterogenous population sample of 210 working women respondents from varied industries and the hypothesis was tested using Partial least squares path modelling software in R studio. We examined the impact of imposter syndrome on leadership style and then checked different moderation of demographic variables namely employment type, marital status, work type, mode of work and Organization type. The study offers scope for future researchers to study the implications of imposter syndrome on other variables like social conditioning, work environment and employee performance, race,  stereotypes at work. The research paper suggests that the dominant view is that there is impact of imposter syndrome on leadership style of women. Results suggest that there is a dire need to address an important issue which involves women leaders who have an inherent tendency to put on more burden on them reducing their own margin for making errors, making them more  vulnerable to the syndrome. The research tries to examine the imposter syndrome and discusses the effect of how imposter syndrome can have negative ramifications on women’s self-worth and consequently even effect their leadership styles which also includes women from high achieving segment. This paper reviews a considerable amount of existing literature on reasons imposter syndrome in women however reviewing of existing studies unravels a couple of gaps establishing relationship between imposter syndrome and leadership style.