Women Go Into Leadership - Female Style Or Male Style?

Confidence, integrity, purpose, empowerment, determination, and courage. These are some of the many words associated with leadership. Regardless of gender, these words apply to all leaders. It is no longer a question of what women leaders are, but rather why there are not women leaders. Today’s society focuses on fulfilling leadership positions with males, not because females do not have the same skills and knowledge as men, but because people associate men with leaders. There are various daily obstacles that women face in the attempt towards leadership roles including prejudice beliefs, resistance due to stereotypes, leadership styles, family life demands and underinvestment in social capital. We have found that through depictions in the media, women are not seen as effective leaders in the same sense as men. These media findings and various research techniques provide evidence for the lack of female presence in leadership positions.

Andersen, JA & Hansson, PH 2011,"At the end of the road? On differences between women and men in leadership behaviour", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, vol. 32 no. 5 pp. 428 – 441

Today, women are subjected to a high volume of ideas regarding what they should do with their lives and how they should behave. Society subjects women to hostility for choosing to work instead of having children or being a working mother. This contrasts women who choose to stay at home that are subjected to mockery for not doing enough with their life and supporting traditional gender roles. What happens when these ideas and concepts are discussed with a woman who happens to be a mother and the president of an extremely profitable credit company? By narrowing and investigating the ideas of women leaders as individuals and not as a whole, it shows that each leader is unique and shaped by their experience. In this paper, a specific woman leader’s opinions and experiences will be discussed compared to multiple theories about women and leadership; her name is Pam Krank and she is the President of The Credit Department, Incorporated. Her company is involved in “credit management outsourcing” and “managing trade receivables for companies’ worldwide” (Krank 1993 n.p.). Pam oversees many employees, some working from a central office in Saint Paul, Minnesota and some who work from home. Pam is working in a masculine dominated field and must be able to navigate leadership in both a masculine and feminine sense. Pam is forced to navigate murky waters because she works in a masculine field with predominantly male dominated companies. The concept of opting-out closely aligns with

This journal seeks to discuss recent identifications and explanations of gender differences in leadership, behaviour & effectiveness in organizations. The models are reviewed based on their contribution and arguments, contextual issues of international and national as well, stereotype and perception of superior and subordinate roles are reviewed and discussed. Rational differences are reviewed and resolved in the context of gender in the perceptions of leadership effectiveness.

For instance, to support the first argument, research should be conducted on women leaders of specific cultures, Smith and Reed initially presented statistics related to female employment. For instance, in the United States approximately 50% of management positions are held by women (Smith & Reed, 2010). Despite the growth in the number of women leadership roles, gender biases continue to exist. For example, in Pakistan women rarely receive support to become leaders because of the belief that they should be at home (Smith & Reed, 2010). As in the previous scenario, these biases are often the result of cultural norms/beliefs, therefore, differences within leadership structures will exist within each subgroup. Smith and Reed (2010) conclude this argument by emphasizing that a greater understanding of women’s leadership influence within each subgroup would “unleash the potential of all citizens in promoting national economic health and prosperity” (p.

In terms of leadership style, gender stereotypes in management positions indicated that women place more emphasis on communication, emotional cooperation, affiliation, and nurturing while men leaders are more active,

In another meta-analysis, Paustain-Underdahl, Walker, and Woehr (2014) used 99 studies conducted between 1962 and 2011, mostly within the United States and Canada. Their goal was to determine how contextual factors including publication date, hierarchal level, percent of male raters, and rating source affect how effective leaders of different genders are seen to be. Their analysis was based on Role Congruity Theory. This theory states that male gender roles and leadership roles are congruent, while female gender roles and leadership roles are not congruent. For this theory, women in leadership positions get disapproval because they are not follow their female gender roles. The researchers found that, while the difference was not significant, men were seen as more effective in earlier publications. All male-dominated organizations favored male leaders over female leaders; however, the difference was only significant in some of them. In female-dominated fields, women leaders were favored as more effective. When comparing different level management positions, female leaders were favored in middle level positions. When the group of people rating the effectiveness of leaders was mostly women, women leaders were favored. Groups of raters that were more gender balanced rated male and female leaders equally. When people were asked to rate their own effectiveness as a leader, the results show male leaders as more effective than female leaders. However, when people rate the

Does gender affect the ability of an individual to become an effective leader? Some researchers believe that effective leaders are just born while others believe that effective leadership can be learned. But few of these researchers discuss the difference that gender may make in becoming good leaders. When we take a look back through history, we can see that the evaluation of women leaders was slow. Today, only 2.4 percent (Gettings, Johnson, Brunner, & Frantz, 2009) of the Fortune 500 Company 's are lead by women which is an increase from the 1.2 percent (www.money.cnn.com) of female Chief Executive Officers in 2002. The gender differences in the corporate world posses several issues for the Human Resource Managers such as management

Looking at the significant body of research on the topic of gendered leadership, the overwhelming opinion is that men and women are thought to behave differently in leadership positions. Analysis of the key traits of masculine and feminine leadership models shows that masculine models value “assertiveness, aggressiveness and a task-focused orientation” while feminine approaches value “empathy, cooperation, and collaboration with an intrapersonal orientation”. Men are thought to bring a “command and control” style to leadership and women a “mentor and coach.”

The key to successfully becoming a leader involves one working their way up to the top of the pyramid, but this can only be done by one advancing their way to different positions in a company. This task can be seen as inherently difficult for women because of two main reasons: one reason is way women leaders are viewed by others, and the other deals with how companies were structured and organized before women were able to enter the workforce. Since men made up most of the workforce many companies were designed to reflect men’s daily lives, situations and their leadership styles. When women were able to come into workforce they had to try to adapt to the situations and leadership styles already in place, making reaching different positions in the workplace almost impossible; women did not live the same daily lives as men and they certainly did not face the same situations as men. The traditional career path to obtaining a higher executive position typically includes rotations in sales or operations, both positions which men are more likely to have had than women. It has been extremely difficult for women to overcome leadership barriers because women have not had the ability to construct the correct leadership identities (Eby, Ibarra, & Kolb).

This is a serious problem because diversity matters, and nowhere is it more important than in leadership. Nevertheless, this report draws on this limited body of research not to limits the number of women who should take up leadership positions. Time will not solve the gender leadership gap; action will. Women’s representation in leadership will not increase substantially without major changes in the culture, policies, and practices of the organizations where women learn and work. Accountability also inspires action, so we need public policies to ensure that employers do the right thing. This is a solvable problem. We can do a great deal to move beyond stereotypical notions about leadership. Gender parity is a step forward for everyone, freeing us to pursue our aspirations, regardless of gender. Barriers and Bias: The Status of Women in Leadership offers a blueprint for getting there.

Leadership is considered a social influence process by which a leader seeks the voluntary participation of followers in an effort to reach an organizations goals (Budworth and Mann, 2010). Furthermore, it is also a process where one person exercises social influence over other members of the group (Budworth and Mann, 2010). Leadership is also a process that involves leaders influencing their followers towards a specific goal achievement (Budworth and Mann, 2010). The concept of leadership is extremely broad and consists of countless theories that apply different concepts to explain what leadership is. The topic of research for the purposes of this paper is the role that gender differences play in transformational leadership in correlation to job satisfaction. This area needs some extra research as many of the studies reviewed within the literature review and outside of this paper have not had enough female leaders to participate in studies. Now, more and more female leaders are emerging and taking on leadership roles, which make it important to study this topic further. Additionally, according to many studies, more leaders and managers are becoming transformational leaders, thus it is important to study the impact that the transformational leadership style has on individuals or employees.

Men in leadership were seen to be more authoritative than women and making it hard for their juniors to approach or interact with them freely. By being more approachable than men, women are thus able to use soft power or persuasion to make their organization run in a particular direction. It should be noted that it is quite economical to make people see the reason as to why they should perform their duties and in a particular way as opposed to hiring people to supervise them and make them follow the rules. This is one of the ways in which women performs exemplary better than men in that organizations are shelved of from human resources issues (Folkman, 2015).

Chemers perceived that there are three theoretical explanations for the main differences between male and female leadership. One difference, the most obvious, is biological differences, which is based around hormones and temperament. The second difference is culturally diversities. This tells that socialized roles are varied per culture. The final difference is structurally determined. The different sexs have very diverse organizational structures (Eagly, Makhijani, & Klonsky, 1992; Chemers, 2000). Placing practical differences aside, the essential problem with women leadership roles is actually seen in the attitudes of those around them. The attitudes people have towards women when they are the ones making decisions are a perception with no objectivity, formally known as a stereotype.

In employments settings, this translates as two different leaderships styles, one being more task-oriented – primarily agentic; the other being more interpersonally oriented – primarily communal (Bales, 1976). Thus, male leaders are more likely than female leaders to use target-focused and authoritative management styles. They also tend to adopt an autocratic leadership style and don’t consult their colleagues very often. They use a command-and-control leadership style. On the other hand, female leaders are more likely to be collaborative and adopt a more democratic leadership style (Ea-gly and Johnson, 1990).