A gender gap in managerial span of control: Implications for the gender pay gap

In the current work, we examine a possible source of gender disparities in pay even when women manage to reach similar levels of the organizational ladder as men. We refer to the concept of “span of control,” or the number of subordinates a leader oversees, and propose that in addition to differences in how high men and women climb up the organizational hierarchy, differences in managers’ span of control can also contribute to the gender pay gap. We suggest that people hold gender stereotypes about managers’ relational model tendencies, or how men and women interact with people they manage, and these stereotypes correspond with people’s lay beliefs about relational models utilized in small and large spans of control: smaller groups are thought to operate based more on communal sharing principles while larger groups are thought to operate based more on authority ranking principles. Because span of control affects compensation, a gender difference in span of control can contribute to gender differences in pay. We found support for these hypotheses in an archival dataset of MBA alumni (N = 1838) and three additional experiments (N = 799).