Gender and Leadership

Topic: Gender and Leadership

Researching leadership skills among men and women, there was much research done that showed how men and women differed in the type of leadership skills and behaviors one acquired. Many of the key questions to take note is if men and women’s leadership styles truly differ with each other and are particular styles less likely to be effective? From much research it was concluded that men and women did in fact differ in their approaches to certain organizational situations and thus making them different leaders.

One of the articles described that women were considered more of a transformational leader than their male leader counterparts. In Druskat’s article “Gender and Leadership Style: Transformational and Transactional Leadership in the Roman Catholic Church,” two leadership styles were assessed in gender differences: transformational and transactional leadership. Transformational leadership is the kind where the leaders fulfill the followers’ higher needs such as, self-motivation and confidence. It also has strong relations to increasing the followers’ levels of motivation and innovation in the highly competitive market by the leaders. These types of leaders show passion in their work and try to instill this into their followers and want to see them reach a point where they also could become future leaders themselves. In contrast, transactional leadership involves people ceding all the command and authority to the manager while the subordinates carry out assigned tasks to reach the goal. Social systems are worked with clear chain commands and the people are motivated by a reward and punishment basis. This particular research conducted in the article looked to explore women’s values and their relationship to leadership style (p. 99).

There were 6,359 participants where subordinates in all-female and all-male religious orders of the Roman Catholic Church and each of these participants completed the...