Gender and Leadership

Gender and Leadership

Bus 655, Designing Effective Organizations

Fall 2009

November 9, 2009

Introduction

It is sometimes said that leaders are born or leaders are made. The importance of strong leadership within an organization is beyond measure. A bold and wise leader is essential to the performance of a team. There are several key traits that we associate with a leader, such as taking initiative, being communicative, being a good listener, accepting responsibility and making good judgments, and taking action.

Leadership has been seen to be constructed socially through people’s expectancies, perceptions, and the attributions of followers, instead of the qualities of the individual. Mainly, these conclusions over value the leader’s influence on the company’s outcomes and fail to take into account the exterior circumstances.

We will evaluate whether the romance of leadership holds true for women as well as for men, since previous research in this area has focused almost exclusively on male leaders. We will also look at whether the romance of leadership, previously demonstrated on measures of perceived charisma, applies to behavioral measures such as evaluations of leadership ability and the allocation of performance-based pay. Lastly, we will take a look at possible gender differences in the process of rewarding leaders, investigating the role of perceptions of charisma and leadership ability in determining the size of bonuses that leaders are awarded.

Author Points

It is said that the romance of leadership does exist for both women and men; however, the pay allocation is different as a function of gender. The allocation of a performance-related bonus for women is usually based on perceptions of her charisma and leadership ability rather than the results from company performances. On the other hand, male bonus allocations result from improved company performance. This leads to increased perceived charisma, increased leadership ability,...