Do men and women have different leadership styles, or are any differences rather superficial and not key to the major leadership styles? What did the world wide study find with regard to gender differences and leadership?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The cross-cultural study suggested that gender differences in leadership styles are generally not large: From Figure 5.1, we can also see that there are some cross-cultural differences in the gap between how often men and women use consideration-leadership behaviors. The gap is especially large for the Nordic cultures, but there are some differences in the Anglo cluster and in the other European cultures as well. The other cultures did not show the gender gap for consideration. In contrast, cross-cultural differences seemed to be relatively unimportant in explaining the small gender differences between men and women in initiating structure: Only one culture differed from the others in its pattern of male-female differences in initiating structure.
The Big Picture: (1) The authors concluded, “In this large worldwide sample, gender differences in managerial behavior appear to be rather limited,” and male and female managers “do not differ much in leadership behaviors” (Van Emmerik et al., 2008, p. 310) [boldface added].