Challenges and considerations for building executive presence in North American female professionals of Asian descent
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This study aims to identify the specific challenges that North American female professionals of Asian descent face in building executive presence and make recommendations for mitigating those challenges. Design/methodology/approach In-depth interviews were conducted with 14 female executives of Asian descent in diverse U.S. and Canadian organizations. The goal was to explore their perceptions of Asian organizational stereotypes and identify how these perceptions, shaped by their cultural and gender identities, have created unique challenges relating to executive presence. Interviewees provided in-depth examples of their challenges and detailed recommendations for neutralizing them. Interview data were coded and analyzed using the Gioia methodology. Findings Results revealed that deferential, reserved and hardworking are the top three perceptions attributed to female professionals of Asian descent working in North America. These perceptions are not commendatory or derogatory by themself. They can be associated with either positive or negative leadership qualities, depending on the specific behaviors exhibited and how those behaviors are interpreted. The authors’ analysis maps the relationship between these perceptions and behaviors associated with the executive presence literature. The respondents’ three key recommendations for neutralizing the negative connotations of these perceptions are discussed. Practical implications The results of this study reinforce the need to develop influence, communication and relational skills (e.g. executive presence) in women of Asian ethnicity. The study respondents’ recommendations provide a foundational curriculum guide for doing so. The results also support the need to train hiring managers to become ever more aware of their cultural biases, focusing on how these biases impact their hiring, performance evaluation and promotion practices. Originality/value There is a dearth of research regarding the career experiences of Asian women working in North American corporations. This qualitative study provides insight into relationships between cultural identity, executive presence and career success and lays the groundwork for future quantitative studies that deepen a theoretical understanding of the relationship of executive presence to impression management and cross-cultural theories.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".