Introduction: what is leadership?
Leadership is the focus of many discussion that aims to identify this or that dimension of leadership, starting from who is a leader, what makes a good and effective leader and ending up with the question 'who is a better leader: a man or a woman?', which presents a great interest for numerous researchers.
Before moving to the gender aspect of leadership, it is worth clarifying what leadership itself is, however, it seems that a final definition hasn't been written yet. Probably, it won't be written ever. It is because of the fact that there're no criteria by which the effectiveness of a leader can be measured accurately. Leadership is something intangible, because one can hardly explain properly why it makes one group more successful and effective than another like one can hardly say what one leader did and what the other one didn't to become more successful (Hobbs & Powers, 1976).
During his life, a person can play the role of both a leader and a follower, which make it difficult to sort out characteristics separating a leader from a follower. Effective leadership cannot be explained by physical characteristics. The process of leadership involves both a follower and a leader, which doesn't make leadership a property of people. Thus, there arises the question whether a leader is born or made. Social scientists tried to answer this question since the 1800s when they consider that leadership is rather about inborn characteristics. In the second half of the 20th century, leadership was considered to be a learned ability, and only recently there has appeared the idea of leadership as the combination of both inborn and learned characteristic and the third dimension situation in what a leader performs. The point is that every person has a certain set of characteristics desirable for a leader and, theoretically, almost everyone can become a potential leader. An added value to becoming a leadership give learning opportunities. However, the difference between the number of such opportunities can differ from person to person, making those with a greater number of opportunities closer to the role of a leader. Finally, the situation determines a leader, as every situation demands certain skills and knowledge. For example, the captain of a football team is a formal leader and likely to be the best player on the team. It means that he was chosen because of the specialized skills he possesses that are suitable for this situation. If the same person was a member of a newspaper staff at the university or school, but knew little about the editorial issues and tricks, he would hardly be appointed to the position of editor, no matter what excellent football skills he has, which means that in this very situation he would be a follower (Hobbs & Powers, 1976).
Therefore, having identified the factors of leadership and moving, finally, to its definition, it should be said that there’s a variety of them. The Collins English Dictionary, for example, defines it as “the ability to lead” or “the position of function of a leader”, but it doesn’t reflect a deeper sense of the process, like the definition offered by Hobbs & Powers (1976): “Leadership is interpersonal influence, exercised in the situation and directed, through the communication process, towards the attainment of a specified goal or goals” (Collins English Dictionary, n.d.; Hobbs & Powers, 1976).
Basically, it makes it clear that the effectiveness of leadership cannot be determined by gender and one cannot say that women are better than men in leadership, or vice versa. However, the point is that there’re differences in male and female leadership.
Leadership and Gender Differences
For the past several decades, one of the most studied issues within the context of leadership was gender differences in leadership styles. The attention of researchers to this issues can be explained by their desire to understand there are not many women leaders. Although women comprise quite a large part of the workforce, one cannot say the same about the proportionate share of women among top administrative positions (Crawford, 2001).
For example, according to the statistics presented by Bailey (2014), in 2012, women held just 3.8% of the top administrative, or CEO, positions in Fortune 500 companies, and only 90 in US Congress with the total 535 seats. Much has been discussed and written about why women have a small share in senior leadership, but there's one thing researchers won’t agree on and it is whether there are fewer women as CEOs because they perform less effectively, or because the society tends to expects them to be (Bailey, 2014).
Speaking about female CEOs, it should be said 20 years ago there were no female CEOs at all in the Fortune 500. As it is seen above there have been made a certain progress recently. However, a low number of women CEOs in may be explained by the gender-based stereotypes prevailing at the workplace.
A historical perspective of gender differences in leadership
Before one can understand clearly the way of thinking on gender differences it is worth looking at the historical perspective of this issue.
It is quite obvious that the issues gender differences in leadership was ignored for a certain period of time in the past. The conception of leadership that people referred to stated that all leaders had a certain set of characteristics that made them leaders and those characteristics considered to be universal, fixed and inborn. Such theory was called “Theory of Leadership,” and as consequences, the issues of gender differences wasn't interesting at all at that time. Therefore, the idea of a woman leader would have been completely weird to ardent proponents of the theory of leadership in 19th and 20th centuries (Moran, 1992).
Moran (1992) gives the example of the article review that is close to the most recent comprehensive view on the differences in male and female leadership styles. Thus, the article said that the authors of nontechnical books aimed at the general audience and the general public stick to the idea of gender differences in leadership styles. These authors of nontechnical books explain that men prefer high control, competitiveness, the hierarchy of authority, and women prefer cooperation and collaboration between managing staff and subordinates and lower control. However, on the other hand, social scientists stick to the view no differences in male and female leadership styles and there’re hardly any reliable differences between men and women who are leaders in organizations. Such discrepancy in the opinion can be explained by the fact that the above-mentioned conclusions are on different types of data, which are research findings and field experience (Moran, 1992).
Basically, women tend to maintain both interpersonal relationships and task accomplishment. The main difference in male and female leadership is that women are likely to implement a democratic or participative style while men are likely to adopt an autocratic or directive style. It can be explained by the fact that women leaders have more developed interpersonal skills and it is more difficult to get accepted in the organization as a leader, that's why they have to "allow input into their decision making” (Moran, 1992).
Moran (1992) in her article present another example of two sex-differentiated leadership styles. Thus, women have “a more task-engrossed and person-invested style”, and men has an “image-engrossed and autonomy-invested style”. Of course, one can hardly say that one style is more effective than the other. They only illustrate the existing differences that may lead to misunderstanding between man and women in the workplace (Moran, 1992).
Obviously, communication also illustrates the gender differences in communication due to the fact that men and women have different life experiences, and they value things differently. For example, men strive for prize status, individual power and independence, while the sense of connection and the power of community are more important for women. Of course, it can’t but determine the patterns of women’s and men’s behavior, influencing also the communication of men and women, which in its turn may also lead to misunderstanding in the workplace, which makes it clear that gender plays quite a significant role in leadership (Moran, 2009).
Leadership and Gender Role
Crawford (2001) in her article refers to the three explanations of differences between male and female leaders, which are 1) biological difference, 2) cultural difference, and 3) structural determination. However, Crawford (2001) underlines the fact that a tiny difference in male and female leadership in reality. The main problem here is the attitude and perception of those who are around them. The most popular explanation are the following but not limited to 1) lack of career orientation 2) lack of potential for leadership, and 3) emotional unstableness. Starting from 1989 some polls showed that there’s a slight change in this attitude, but still the majority believe that a woman can be successful in the business exceptionally (Crawford, 2001). One can logically ask what prevent to change the attitude completely making the majority think that women can be as effective leaders as men. The answer is rooted in stereotypes based on gender.
Leadership and Gender Stereotypes
Speaking about gender stereotypes and their role in explaining the difference in male and female leadership, it is worth referring to a special term which is known as Gender-Role Spillover. It means that gender-based expectations can be easily transferred from social interactions into the workplace. At the workplace, people tend to add leadership and management stereotypes to the gender-based stereotypes they bring with them from the social interactions. Therefore, it is very important to take into consideration both women and leaders stereotypes, as well as the gender role to understand how they are perceived (Crawford, 2001).
Stereotypes are truly one of the impediments for women leaders. If a negative stereotype determines the perception of a person, it will be very difficult to change this perception, as it means that this person will have to work hard to change his or her colleagues’ negative perception to the positive one. However, if a woman leader can boast of excellent performance and high results, illustrating her effectiveness, she won’t be under evaluated. In this regards, woman’s performance won’t be perceived through the prism of stereotypes (Crawford, 2011).
Going further, the general stereotype about women says that they are friendly, concerned with others, unselfish, and emotionally expressive. Men's stereotypes tell that they are independent, masterful, competent and assertive, which fully coincides with the stereotype about a good leader. As it was already mentioned, women lead in a democratic style, and men prefer autocratic style, which again creates certain stereotypes about male and female leadership. It becomes complicated when women start to use a manly and autocratic style, and others suggest they have a large ambition for power and achievement, which increase the likelihood of unfair and, what is worse, negative evaluation The differences between the stereotype, meaning that a woman should stick to the democratic leadership style, and the opposite behavior leads to discomfort to the subordinate The more autocratic behavior a woman shows, the more negative her perception is. Gender stereotypes mean that a woman's behavior will be interpreted differently from men's behavior in the same situation, which gives more flexibility to men leaders. Moreover, the above-mentioned information confirms the great power and influence of gender stereotypes on male and female leadership (Crawford, 2001).
However, there is another research that explains the difference between male and female leadership by other criteria. Surprisingly, the findings show that women can be more effective than men as leaders.
Differences in age, overall effectiveness, competencies, etc.
Sherwin (2014) conducted research illustrating that women are more effective than men. The research findings include the data of 2011 and 2012. The research was based on samples of about 16,000 leaders, two-thirds of whom were men and only one-third women. Each of them had on average 13 respondents, including their subordinates, peers, and managers. Therefore, the evaluation of overall effectiveness showed that women perform better: 51.8% of males versus 54.5% of females (Sherwin, 2014).
When women are asked to explain the difference in the effectiveness they say that they have to work twice as much as men do and never make a mistake (Sherwin, 2014).
The evaluation of the leadership competencies, such as initiative taking, relationships building, collaboration and teamwork, self-development and others, shows that women scored higher than men. In total, women scored higher on 12 of the 16 competencies that were offered, which again confirms women’s leadership effectiveness (Sherwin, 2014).
Analyzing the results of leadership competencies, it should be mentioned that most people who were asked assumed that women will score higher on the so-called nurturing competencies like developing others, relationship building, inspiring and motivating others, collaboration, and teamwork. However, the results clearly demonstrated that the competencies with “the largest positive differences” are rather initiative taking, integrity and honesty displaying, and driving for results, which are not nurturing competencies at all. Obviously, women scored high also on nurturing competencies. This fact only highlights the fact that women are good leaders, as the above-mentioned skills fit good leaders (Sherwin, 2014).
It interesting to turn to the evaluation based on functions within the organizations.
In the traditional male areas like sales, engineering, or, for example, IT function, women are more effective than a man too. This fact may come to a surprise as here appears the influence of stereotypes that were already discussed. These stereotypes are likely to make us think that the above-mentioned areas are "manly".
Moreover, the difference in the leadership effectiveness can be explained by the fact that the higher women’s position in the organization, the more positively and better they are perceived, eliminating the negative effects of stereotypes (Sherwin, 2014).
Conclusion
Summing everything up, it should be said that male and female leadership is not easy issues to discuss, and to identify who performs better is more difficult. The thing is that here several factors should be considered: the situation in which the leader performs and the area of the organization within which he or she performs; also stereotypes play not the last role in this process. For example, in traditionally male-dominated areas like military or governmental organizations men could boast of more effective leadership like, and women were successful female dominated environments like education and social services. It is interesting to know that men rank themselves higher than women. However, other people think that women were considered to be more effective in mid- and upper-level positions (Bailey, 2014).
What is more important, one can come across different results regarding the effectiveness of women and male in leadership. It is so because different researchers examine different perspectives of male and female leadership. For example, there can appear a danger of new stereotypes if some findings state there are gender-linked leadership styles, but other research findings clearly show that women can choose a male style of leadership being autocratic instead of being democratic, like the majority is used to think, and vice versa, men can stick to the democratic leadership style, not the typical for men autocratic style (Moran, 1992).
Therefore, when analyzing male and female leadership style it should be mentioned, that women, despite their small share of senior positions, can perform even better than man, and leadership depends on the certain situation, organization and task. Stereotypes should be also taken into consideration as they play a significant role.
References
Bailey, S. (2014, July 23). Who Makes A Better Leader: A Man Or A Woman? Retrieved February 29, 2016, from http://www.forbes.com/sites/sebastianbailey/2014/07/23/who-makes-a-better-leader-a-man-or-a-woman/#484266fe9676
Crawford, A. L. (2001). Women in Leadership: The Stereotyping of Women. Kellog Journal of Organizational Behavior, 3-24. Retrieved February 29, 2016, from https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/research/ktag/resources/papers/crawford.pdf
Fairchild, C. (2015, January 14). Why so few women are CEOs. Retrieved February 29, 2016, from http://fortune.com/2015/01/14/why-so-few-women-ceos/
Hobbs, D. J., & Powers, R. C. (1976). Leadership. What is it? Its Dimensions. Ames, Iowa: IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY of Science and Technology. Retrieved February 29, 2016, from http://www.soc.iastate.edu/extension/pub/comm/Soc1.pdf
Leadership. (n.d.). Retrieved February 28, 2016, from http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/leadership
Moran, B. B. (1992). Gender Differences in Leadership. Library Trends, 40(3), 475-491. Retrieved February 29, 2016, from https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/7791/librarytrendsv40i3h_opt.pdf?sequ
Sherwin, B. (2014, January 24). Why Women Are More Effective Leaders Than Men. Retrieved February 29, 2016, from http://www.businessinsider.com/study-women-are-better-leaders-2014-1
