Navigating the labyrinth: senior women managing emotion

The paper is based on a presentation at a British Academy of Management sponsored research seminar on Gender and Emotions, May 2008. The paper draws upon agentic and communal leadership (Eagly and Carli, 2007) to explore the gendered nature of senior leadership for women and identifies contradictions between the emotion 'advantages' to women leaders, current theorised in the literature and the disadvantages (Ross-Smith et al., 2007) of women becoming 'emotion specialists'. By 'seeing' repertoires of emotion management and emotion work of senior women, we can recognise the different gendered expectations of women leader's emotionality, emotion management and emotion work in organisation.