Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2015
Abstract
Legislators as leaders have an immense effect on our lives, and for many, influence our ability to thrive and have equal opportunities for health and prosperity. Legislators are representatives elected by the people of the district in which they live. As a representative, they are the voice of that constituency group. They determine local, state and national policies that impact both our constitutional rights and government support as citizens of the United States. But little research is available about how they make decisions and if there are differences between male and female legislator decision-making approaches. These attributes include personal values which influence voting, gender differences, and perspective taking or listening skills, when collecting data and understanding constituents or advocates views. In an effort to address this gap, we conducted a qualitative inquiry involving semi-structured interviews with 28 former or current legislators, primarily from the Midwest. We sampled both men and women with a wide array of public service experience and years of committee or leadership within both Democratic and Republican parties. We obtained insight to best understand gender leadership differences in decision-making approaches, how they collect data and negotiate and balance different perspectives when managing complicated issues.
Keywords
legislators, executives, decision making, Weatherhead School of Management, leadership, gender, diversity, decision-making, policy, values, listening, communal, agency
Rights
© The Author(s). This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Department/Center
Design & Innovation
Recommended Citation
Battaglia, Alison J., "How Do They Do It? Legislators As Leaders: A Study of Legislators' Values and Decision-Making" (2015). Student Scholarship. 239.
https://commons.case.edu/studentworks/239