1691: A Playful Path to More Professional Equity? Networking Across Diversity via Sport (10626)

Leaders develop via all domains of their lives. Yet, leaders’ sports involvement has been largely overlooked despite its theoretical and practical relevance, particularly for social development. Moreover, the limited research on the downstream social consequences of leaders’ sports involvement reveals different effects for men and women leaders—even opposing effects for the latter. Thus, we integrate social cognitive theory from developmental psychology to make sense of these contradictory findings. We theorize that sports contexts facilitate women’s networking with higher-status (male) leaders through its playfulness (i.e., leisurely, spontaneous, and socially interactive). An archival study of 644 leaders’ Twitter/X posts shows that sports generate more engagement—especially men interacting with women leaders’ sports posts (Study 1). A qualitative study with 58 leaders suggests sports’ playfulness facilitates these interactions as well as networking, results that we also quantitatively validated using ChatGPT (Study 2). Two recall experiments (Ntotal = 1,076) showed women leaders’ networking in sports (vs. traditional) contexts was more playful, and more playful sports contexts facilitated women (vs. men) leaders’ networking across gender and status differences (Pilot Study, Study 3). Our results show that more playful sports contexts facilitate women leaders’ successful networking across gender and status diversity—an innovation helping to level the playing field of gendered social capital development and future leadership inequalities in organizations. These results advance our understanding of conventional ways of networking as not always strategic and planned while also adding to diversity research by showing that sports—often framed as exclusionary—can also be inclusive.

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