Leadership and Gender Differences
It has often been said that neither men nor women make better leaders; they are just different. Discuss the veracity of this statement. Do you think it is true or not? After reading this article, analyze the difference (if any) between male and female leaders and explain under what circumstances each would be more beneficial for organizational performance.
Abstract
In this chapter, we aim to highlight the main gender differences in terms of leadership, to provide a critical comparative analysis, to discuss potential barriers that need to be over-come, and to find some ways of increasing organizational performance through a better leadership style. The focus will not be placed on the gender differences by themselves but on the ways these differences can positively influence the organizational performance. Our proposed chapter is mainly based on literature review as a methodology in its own right. Since literature review has revealed quite many divergent opinions, we also used questionnaires and interviews as data collection tools and we intend to present some of our results, without aiming to generalize all these results to different cultures. We cannot conclude that men's leadership skills are more powerful and more important than women's skills or vice versa, but it is clear that gender differences do exist and people should capitalize on them. We consider the word 'complementary' is better than the word ‘different' when talking about leadership styles and that it is possible for leaders to develop a series of skills that are not necessarily traditionally linked to their own gender.
Keywords: leadership styles, gender, communication, motivation, femininity versus masculinity
Source: Catalina Radu, Alecxandrina Deaconu, and Corina Frasineanu, https://openresearchlibrary.org/viewer/9c1b2ec2-5ec2-4e91-be36-21f88b88adae/1
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.