Male and Female Leadership Styles

¶ … journal is the Psychologist-Manager Journal.

Psychologists who are in management would receive the most benefit from the information and articles provided in the journal. The articles contained in it would generally not be of interest to anyone who was outside the field of academic psychology.

The title of the chosen article is Women "Take Care," Men "Take Charge": Managers' Stereotypic Perceptions of Women and Men Leaders. This article is interesting to me because it shows that there is sexism still alive in the workplace, and that many managers do not think women can lead as well as men, simply because some of their tactics may be different.

The article is 25 pages long, including title page and reference list.

The major sections of the article, according to the headings, are: Gender Stereotypes and Their Effects on Women Leaders, The Present Research, Method, Analyses, Results, Discussion, Limitations, Conclusion, Implications, Acknowledgements, and References.

6. The author states two hypotheses in the form of predictions, saying "managers would judge women leaders to be more effective than men at leadership behaviors that they perceived to be reliant on the relationship-oriented, caretaker traits that are attributed to women by feminine stereotypes," and "managers would judge men leaders to be more effective than women at leadership behaviors that they perceived to require the agentic, take-charge traits that are attributed to men by masculine stereotypes."

7. In short, the authors are saying that they think men would be better leaders when male-centric traits were required and women would be better leaders when female-centric traits were required, as specific traits are commonly believed to belong to one gender or the other.

8. Exactly 296 managers who were part of a leadership panel that was developed at a business school in a large university in the Midwest who were used as the study population.

9. The article has a section on the method, which was to survey the 296 managers who were part of the leadership panel. The results of the survey were then collected for analysis. Fifty-seven percent of the participants were women and 43% were men.

10. The method of scientific research was the survey, and it was a quantitative study using ANOVA tests to produce data to be analyzed and studied.

11. There is information on the significance of the results, contained within the actual discussion section of the article.

12. The significance of the study is that men and women both have different styles of leadership, but their abilities to do their jobs properly and the actual differences in the way they lead are not as different as the study's authors originally believed.

13. The conclusions reached are that women give women more credit for being capable leaders, and men give men more credit. This is not particularly surprising, since both genders do tend to side with those who are more like them. However, the authors also concluded that women were more likely to see women as nurturing and compassionate leaders, where men did not see women this way -- even though compassionate and nurturing roles traditionally are expected of women and not expected of men.

14. The research article was somewhat difficult to understand because of the ANOVA testing, but the conclusions were convincing and made sense. Being divided along gender lines is nothing new, so that was not surprising.