Are women and men different leaders? This question has always been surrounded with much controversy. Two opposing positions are generally taken in this debate. The position that men and women differ fundamentally in how they lead others is most prominent in popular management literature, i.e. books and magazines written primarily for practicing managers and the general public (Helgesen, 1990) Some scholars who subscribe to this difference position claim that women have a different, "female voice" that has been overlooked by mainstream theory and research (Perrault, 1996).
On the other hand, a considerable portion of the social science literature favors the similarity position, claiming that, all things considered (or controlled for), men and women lead in similar ways. Empirical evidence for both positions accumulated through the years, contributing to the confusion in the field. In 1990, Eagly and Johnson published a meta-analysis on gender differences in leadership styles, based on studies done between 1961 and 1987. Its major conclusion was that, in organizational studies, female and male leaders did not differ in interpersonally oriented style and task oriented style. In two other types of studies, laboratory and assessment studies, men were found to be more task oriented and women more interpersonally oriented. Also, women tended to adopt a more democratic or participative style and a less autocratic style than men in all three types of studies (Eagly, Johnson, 1990).
In the present article, I aim to review the more recent empirical evidence on similarities and differences in women's and men's leadership styles to find out whether there is still such a mixture of sometimes contradictory results, or that perhaps more unity is emerging.
Women and Men Leaders: Different or alike?
A challenging issue is that leadership traditionally has been studied using male norms as the standard for behaviors. As noted by......
