Leadership Styles of Women and Men

This week’s reading module showed that women and men differ regarding their leadership and management styles. On the one hand, women in leadership positions use leadership forms that are more inclined towards compassion, also called clement leadership behavior (Zbihlejová et al., 2018, p. 341). On the other hand, men use the authoritarian leadership form, which is more of a command and control approach.

The leadership form women use, which is inclined to emphasize collaboration, creates space for a healthy work environment. Such leaders place more value on building relationships with those who work with or for them. Furthermore, these relationships are built on effective communication, which is open and honest, fosters trust, and encourages teamwork, significantly affecting the company’s success. Contrastingly, with a more lenient approach to leading, women can be viewed as less assertive, and this can cause challenges, especially with people with gender biases.

One of the strengths of authoritarian leadership, mostly adopted by men, is reducing the time needed to make a decision. This leadership approach leaves much of the decision-making to the one in control without consultation (Khan et al., 2015, p. 88). Conversely, one weakness of this leadership style is reducing the amount of team input into the company. Leaving most of the decisions to one person excludes every other person and suppresses them as well. Consequently, this ignores other people in the company and suppresses their creativity, which can lead to resentment.

Notably, men and women are equally effective leaders (Zbihlejová et al., 2018, p. 345; Timko, 2017, p. 1). However, there are situations where women fall short, but this is entirely due to the gender-based challenges they face as women. Living in a patriarchal society means that gender biases that discriminate against women and negatively affect them as leaders are inevitable. Other challenges women face include sexual harassment and life-work balance (Haile et al., 2016, p. 38). Besides these challenges, men and women are equally effective leaders on a fair playing field.

In conclusion, both women and men tend to have different leadership approaches. Women are more relation-oriented, while men are task-oriented. However, neither of these approaches makes one an ineffective leader. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, and the success of a leader depends on the individual. Nevertheless, it is key to note that women face more challenges in leadership than men, mostly due to gender discrimination.

References

Haile, S., Emmanuel, T., & Dzathor, A. (2016). Barriers and challenges confronting women for leadership and management positions: Review and analysis. International Journal of Business & Public Administration, 13(1).

Khan, M. S., Khan, I., Qureshi, Q. A., Ismail, H. M., Rauf, H., Latif, A., & Tahir, M. (2015). The styles of leadership: A critical review. Public Policy and Administration Research, 5(3), 87-92.

Timko, K. (2017). Gender, communication styles, and leader effectiveness.

Zbihlejová, L., Frankovský, M., & Birknerová, Z. (2018). Leadership styles of managers from the perspective of gender. International Journal of Organizational Leadership, 7, 340-347.

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Question

Prompt: After reading the module resources, share your perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of typical women’s and men’s leadership and management styles.