Descriptive and prescriptive gender stereotypes research suggests that men are expected to engage in more agentic behaviors and women in more communal behavior as leaders. However, gender and leadership research has not explicitly measured expectations of men and women leaders nor considered how followers evaluate leaders who fail to fulfill or exceed expectations for agentic and communal behaviors. This vignette study sought to accomplish both by measuring follower expectations for a communal and an agentic leader behavior, manipulating these behaviors, and measuring follower perceptions and evaluations to investigate whether congruence between followers' expectations and supervisors' subsequent behavior produces similar evaluations of men and women leaders. Results indicate followers expected higher levels of communal behavior from the female than the male supervisor, but no differences were found in expectations for agentic behavior, suggesting a double standard in gender role-congruent behavior expectations. Regardless of whether expectations were exceeded or unmet, supervisor gender did not moderate effects of agentic or communal behavior expectations-perceptions incongruence on evaluations of effectiveness or liking in polynomial regression analyses. Implications and future research directions are discussed.
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