BEING THE MOTHER LEADER IN PATRIARCHAL CULTURE: NURTURING MILLENNIALS IN ENABLING HIGH-PERFORMANCE ORGANIZATIONS

• Main Author: Wijaya, Irka
• Format: Theses
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/69596
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

To stay viable in the current dynamic economic environment, organizations must be agile and adapt to internal and external changes that happen around them. One of the factors to be analyzed is leadership, which plays a vital role in agile organizations and their performance. Within the topic of leadership, the rise of women sitting in leadership positions and millennials dominating the workforce bring new dynamics to the organizations. While the first brings a new dynamic with the role duality due to gender expectations in patriarchal culture, the latter comes with their leadership expectations. The role duality of women comes with the consequences of both roles interfering with each other, including their motherhood experience that brings out the distinctive motherhood leadership characteristics. To re-emphasize the unique aspect of motherhood leadership characteristics, this study also did a preliminary interview with a gender specialist who is a mother of two. Despite this, the motherhood leadership characteristics were still rarely explored in the previous studies and existing leadership theories. Therefore, this research aims to determine the motherhood leadership characteristics that support millennials in enabling high-performance organizations from millennials’ perspectives. This research adopted a phenomenological approach, focusing on descriptive phenomenology to capture the essence of motherhood leadership characteristics from millennials’ perspectives. Ten interviews were conducted with ten millennials who have or had prior experience working under mother leaders for minimum of six months. Modified Stevick-Colaizzi-Keen method to analyze the phenomenological interview result was adopted, resulting in five main themes of motherhood leadership characteristics that answer the objective of this research. Five motherhood leadership characteristics were captured from the millennials’ perspectives: (1) altruistically nurturing; (2) strategic multi-tasking; (3) charismatic; (4) individualization inclusivity; and (5) flexibility supported by trust. These five characteristics synergistically work together to shape the context of motherhood leadership characteristics that support millennials’ performance in organizations. They also can be pictured within a spectrum, spanning from people- oriented and adaptive. In their motherhood leadership characteristics, mother leaders have symbiotic dyadic relationships with millennials through job delegation. Through their charismatic upbringing, mother leaders provide millennials with the desirable platform to sharpen their skills by learning and developing. On the other hand, millennials give mother leaders room for broader responsibilities, including handling their dual domestic and professional responsibilities. This research answers the current dynamics in organizations by incorporating women's leadership and the millennial workforce. Based on the result, millennials perceive the distinctive motherhood leadership as supporting their performance, whereas in the end, supporting organizational performance. Therefore, especially in patriarchal culture where women face role duality and stereotypical leader has consistently been shown as men, organizations and their leaders must be adept to seeing the phenomena as one of the keys to maximizing organizational performance.