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Introduction
The rise of women top managers in the last decades is almost phenomenal. As early as 2005, female Chief Financial Officers in major American corporations constitutes 7.5 percent of all managers in this position and female Chief Executive Officers around 1.5 percent, a significant increase in representation from the levels (3.0 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively) seen in 1994 (Huang and Kisgen 822). This female representation, though, is still too small to not indicate the presence of culturally defined stereotypical bias against women for the management position, the so-called ‘glass ceiling’ barrier against women in the workplace. This statistics may explain the limited influence that women have in the top management of contemporary corporations. However, it reveals nothing about how female and male managers perform relatively in their jobs. This essay will attempt to bridge that informational gap by providing a consolidated report from the current executive gender difference literature.
This undertaking, however, reflects a growing interest in the study of gender differences among managers and top executives not just on their legal implications in a climate of increased concern over employment discrimination but also in the effectiveness of their management and leadership styles, which, as early as 1997, have reached the far continent of Australia (Palmer and Kandasaami 67-68). The trend calls for more enthusiasm among students and professionals in the field of business and management for more contribution.
Nevertheless, I will focus my analysis of the selected literature on the subject of management as a whole (not on leadership alone), which is essentially an administrative function, involving such tasks as setting budgets, monitoring operational progress, and making sure that things work in the day-to-day business operations (Maccoby 57). Although, these tasks are essentially delegated to subordinate members of the division or the departmental team, a good manager needs to know these tasks by heart and with clear standards of quality to ensure accurate, relevant, effective, and efficient performance. Thus, it is not often correct to contend that good management is dispensable when subordinate competencies are high.
Conversely, leadership is a relationship, albeit an influencing and not a managerial (administrative), function that nevertheless plays an essential role in the manager’s job, which also involves people management, relationship enhancement, and subordinate motivation for positive changes in mindsets and work values (Maccoby 57). Oftentimes, though, the managers will themselves in situations that call for effective leadership to resolve or accomplish (e.g. a company-wide change program that must take root and establish new methodologies and culture in the manager’s department). Considering that scenario, leadership is included here as a non-administrative function of the manager and only one of the many functions of the manager, whether or not it plays an critical role in driving employees toward change and upgrading overall corporate performance in human resource competency, organizational processes, and finance.
The first two sections of this essay present specific characteristics of the feminine and the masculine management styles that had been found crucial and valuable in the functions of female and male executives, respectively. In the interest of uniformity and comparability, these traits are grouped into in-paragraph subsection categories, namely: decision making, people management, leadership style, personality traits, and overall management style. All characteristics mentioned in each of these sections are stronger traits of either the female or the male executive compared to each other, respectively. Less prominent characteristics are given less emphasis.
The third section attempts to differentiate these gender-defined managerial characteristics based on five non-comprehensive categories (decision making, people management, leadership style, personal traits, and overall management style). A brief discussion follows on the positive and negative implication of these traits to the company and its stakeholders, particularly the shareholders and the employees.
The Feminine Management Style
There are specific traits in the management style of women executives that play crucial roles in their successes in the job; traits that distinguishes the feminine approach to that of the masculine. These strengths are categorized, less comprehensively, into decision making, people management, leadership style, personal traits, and overall management style.
Decision Making: (1) Financial Decisions: Female executives, according to Huang and Kisgen (823), tend to issue less debt and should they do, their announcement returns in debt offerings tend to be higher. They also do not make significant changes, upward or downward, to their company’s overall leverage level or profile. These decision making orientation tends to increase shareholder value through a more financially healthy company with less financial risks taken. (2) Growth Decisions: Huang and Kisgen (823) observed that female executives tend to grow their companies more slowly and less likely to do so through acquisitions. They also showed greater “announcement returns” than male executives. This indicates general investor confidence to female decision making. In addition, they showed higher scores in such power dimensions as experimentalism and venturesome (Palmer and Kandasaami 71). (3) Earnings Forecasting Decisions: Female executives tend to make conservative earnings forecasts, which result to wider trading bands for its shares in the stock market (Huang and Kisgen 823). This is partly the reason for greater acquisition announcement returns of female executives.
People Management: (1) Handling Performance Issues: Palmer and Kandasaami (70) observed that female managers use norm of equality when handling subordinates with poor performances wherein differences in performance do not dictate how employees were treated as persons handling subordinate functions. All employees receive equal opportunities to grow in their work and enjoy the benefits and perks due them. (2) Handling Employee Relationships: Female executives tend to be warm and chatty in their approach to their interpersonal contacts with employees, confirming the feminine predisposition towards relationships with co-workers. This creates a warm and open atmosphere of interaction, which appeals strongly with female employees but may cause discomfort to the more direct conversational, and often reserved, tendencies of male employees (“When the Boss is a Woman”).
Leadership Style: Female leaders have stronger transformational tendency in their leadership style (“When the Boss is a Woman”). They provide transformative role models, supportive to employee development, and motivate employees towards dedication and creativity.
Personal traits: Palmer and Kandasaami (69-71) noted supposedly unique qualities of females, such as affiliation, attitudinal commitment (e.g. to the organization), attachment, cooperativeness, nurturance, and emotionality. These qualities are important factors in company loyalty and in low rates of employee turnover, which can be costly if not under adequate control.
Overall Management Style: The American Psychological Association (“When the Boss is a Woman”) characterized the feminine management style as typically mentoring or coaching, less authoritarian and more nurturing in approach, and highly favorable in female-dominated organizations in female-dominated industries, such as services (e.g. employment, educational, social assistance, advertising, public relations, child day care, hotels), financial services (e.g. insurance), and nonprofits (e.g. advocacy, grantmaking, civic). The management style is interpersonal-oriented, participative, and democratic. This management style tends to be warm, informal, energetic, and open.
The Masculine Management Style
Like the female approach, the male management style has its own unique strengths and drawbacks. Trait categories explored include decision making, people management, leadership style, personal traits, and overall management style.
Decision Making: (1) Financial Decisions: Huang and Kisgen (823) noted that male executives tend to make earnings forecasts that constitute significantly narrower bands than female executives. Male managers also tend to be replaced more, usually within four years of tenure, indicating general perception of their overconfidence, which risks making non-enhancing shareholder value decisions. They also tend to exercise less deep-in-the-money stock options than female executives, which again supports the theory of overconfidence. (2) Growth Decisions: Male executives tend to be highly confident in investment tasks (Palmer and Kandasaami 67). However, the difference narrows considerably with females of high self-confidence. Moreover, the acquisitions taken by male executives, according to Huang and Kisgen (823), tend to have negative impacts on announcement returns, thus to shareholder value. Men also scored higher in power dimensions of tough-mindedness, assertiveness, and self-sufficiency (Palmer and Kandasaami 71). (3) Earnings Forecast Decisions: Huang and Kisgen (823) found male executives to be highly optimistic in their earnings forecast, which investors tend to distrust, resulting to significantly narrower share price bands in the stock market.
People Management: (1) Handling Performance Issues: Palmer and Kandasaami (70) noted that male managers use equity norm in handling employees with poor performances. (2) Handling Personnel Relationship: Male executives tend to be more task-oriented than relationship oriented so that they can be easily perceived as more controlling that their female counterparts (“When the Boss is a Woman”). This highly businesslike approach tends to alienate female employees who are more comfortable in a warm interactive atmosphere where positive emotions are permitted some freedom of expression. However, this fits perfectly with male employees who tend to talk more on work matters than personal chattiness.
Leadership Style: The male leadership style tends to be autocratic where control is of paramount importance and the voice of the top executives, even without employee consultation, is expected to be the law. They tend to use wider strategic ranges in their influence strategies, which are more positive than negative. They also tend to make more influencing attempts than females (Palmer and Kandasaami 70).
Personal Traits: (1) Self-Confidence: Older studies found no significant difference in the work-related self-confidence between men and women managers (Maccoby 57). However, an over-confidence has been detected by Huang and Kisgen (823) in male financial decisions. (2) Other Traits: Researchers (Palmer and Kandasaami 71) also found masculine strength in the trait of commitment (i.e. in professional associations).
Overall Management Style: Men are traditionally known for their typical “command and conquer” management style, which is highly popular and effective in male-dominated organizations in male-dominated industries (“When the Boss is a Woman”), such as development (e.g. construction), academics (e.g. mathematics), mass media (e.g. sports reporting), government service (e.g. law enforcement, military, politics), food preparation (e.g. chef), technology, entertainment (e.g. comedy), and services (e.g. accounting and finance, emergency-firefighting). The management style is task-oriented, highly directive, autocratic, direct, sometimes cold, and less open.
The Feminine-Masculine Differences
In the field of gender analysis in the management context, certain traditional gender-specific stereotypes had been long accepted. For instance, the male gender as characteristically masculine had been described as self-reliant, aggressive, competitive, and decisive. Conversely, females were considered feminine, and described as sympathetic, gentle, shy, and sensitive to the need of others. Nonetheless, with all things equal, it is reasonable to accept that feminine and masculine management styles are equally effective. However, when viewed from the organizational context, significant differences can be observed (“When the Boss is a Woman”).
Decision Making: There is overconfidence of male managers in their financial and growth decisions, tending to be more aggressive and risk-taking, relative to female managers who tend to be more conservative in handling finance and gradual in expanding business reach. The masculine management style poses a danger to the shareholder value while allowing for a stronger and faster growth performance when things work well as planned. The feminine management style ensures a risk-free financial management while risking getting left out in a highly competitive environment where decisiveness can be crucial in taking opportunities to increase the market share (“When the Boss is a Woman”).
People Management: Women managers tend to be warmer and chattier than their male counterparts who tend to be direct and autocratic. This differences in their approach towards their subordinates brought important uniqueness to their respective management styles that will not work in environments where the other is well-accepted. Female employees will experience an increased level of distress when working in an autocratic and relationally cold environment. Conversely, a chatty officer candidate will not be respected in a military organization (“When the Boss is a Woman”).
Leadership Style: Studies as far back as 1972 (Palmer and Kandasaami 68) showed no difference between women and men in their leadership characteristics, such as influence on their staff, strength of their respective agentic as well as communal qualities, and assertiveness. However, growing studies showed that differences in the female and male leadership styles (Alemie ‘back-cover summary’) with the females tend to be more transformational and participatory and the males more work-oriented and autocratic (“When the Boss is a Woman”). While this may be useful in less hierarchical structures in many companies today, it will boomerang in traditional male-dominated environments, such as organized sports. Meanwhile, males are known to be autocratic leaders. While this style works perfectly in command-and-control corporate environments, it will backfire in relationship intensive retail settings. However, these differences narrow considerably with women of high self-confidence.
Overall Management Style: More comprehensive studies of stereotypical traits in the ideal manager (e.g. Ryan, Haslam, Hersby, and Bongiorno 477-478; “When the Boss is a Woman”), however, showed that the feminine and masculine qualities were equally associated especially for successful companies. Specifically, nine of 11 female traits overlapped with six of eight male traits. This overlap indicates certain traits that female and male executives in their work qualities. However, the areas where they do not overlap tend to define their ultimate gender-conditioned management style, which is warm, developmental, and conservative among female executives and direct, autocratic, and risk-taking among male managers. Alemie (back-cover summary) observed differences in such areas as emergence, overall effectiveness, and employee acceptance.
Conclusion and Recommendation
It has been established in the gender management literature that the concept of the ‘good’ or ‘successful’ manager was a concept of the male manager (Ryan, Haslam, Hersby, and Bongiorno 470, 476-477). Considering the essential differences between female and male managers (descriptive), the selection of managers almost automatically screens out the female candidates (prescriptive). At times, even with many important similarities between the genders, the stereotypical bias does the screening out.
The studies on management contexts revealed that gender differences in management styles work best in congruent environments. The feminine and masculine management style works best in female and male dominated companies, respectively. Placing a woman (or male) manager in a male (or female) dominated company may result in temperament and management style compatibility problems. Managers who insist on working in companies dominated by the opposite gender should be prepared to adapt the strengths of the opposite-gender management style in order to succeed. Since decision makers for promotion selection belong to the opposite gender, e.g. female, and are more attuned and confident to the effectiveness of the feminine management style within the organization (“When the Boss is a Woman”), the odds are expected to be overwhelmingly against the male manager’s career advancement. Female managers must learn the ‘command-and-conquer’ style of management; while the male managers the mentoring-coaching management style.
The movement towards equal employment opportunities is gaining speed each year. It is inevitable that someday male managers and female managers will be more or less equally represented in the management team. Certain companies (e.g. Sodexo) already managed to do that. However, while change remains in transit, it is wiser for managers to exploit the gender context and perhaps wait reaching the top for the opportunity to make gender-oriented changes.
Works Cited
Alemie, A.B. Perceived Difference between Male and Female Managers: The Impact of Gender
Stereotyping on Leadership Style, Emergence, Effectiveness and Acceptance Saarbrucken, Germany: Lap Lambert Academic Publishing, 2011. Print.
“When the Boss is a Woman.” American Psychological Association.com. 22 March 2006. Web.
Huang, J. and Kisgen, D.J. “Gender and Corporate Finance: Are Male Executives Overconfident
Relative to Female Executives?” Journal of Financial Economics 2013: 822-839. PDF file.
Maccoby, M. “Understanding the Difference between Management and Leadership.” Research
Technology Management January-February 2000: 57-59. PDF file.
Palmer, G. and Kandasaami, T. “Gender in Management: A Sociological Perspective.” The
International Journal of Accounting August 1997: 67-99. PDF file.
Ryan, M.K., Haslam, S.A., Hersby, M.D., and Bongiorno, R. “Think-Crisis – Think Female: The
Glass Cliff and Contextual Variation in the Think Manager – Think Male Stereotype.” Journal of Applied Psychology 2011: 470-484. PDF File.
