This past week, I went with a group from the Doerr Institute on a “leadership excursion,” where a group of students and I got the opportunity to meet with Lisa Falkenberg, editor of the Houston Chronicle’s opinion section. She spoke to us about her position as a new leader and more specifically her style of leadership.
Before we actually went on the trip we had to read an article “Leadership that Gets Results” by Daniel Goleman. In it, Goleman describes six distinct styles of leadership (Coercive, Authoritative, Affiliative, Democratic, Pacesetting, and Coaching), along with each of their strengths and weaknesses. According to this article, coercive “demands immediate compliance,” authoritative “motivates people toward a vision” with a confident, commanding presence, affiliative “creates harmony,” and democratic “forges consensus through participation.” (For the purpose of this blog, I am focusing on these four variations)
The article does not go into how gender can affect differences in style, but Lisa did draw this distinction when talking to us. She explained to our group of majority female students that in her leadership role, overseeing many men who are often a couple of decades her senior, she has to predominantly utilize collaboration and democracy. According to Lisa, if she were to use a “dominant, assertive” tone as a leader, the writers under her authority would not take her seriously and they would not be inclined to listen to her; she stressed that as a younger woman, she needs their buy-in in order to be successful.
But do men need this same “buy-in” as leaders? And in what ways does an authority figure’s gender affect how they lead others, and especially how others perceive them as a leader?
In 2005, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania held a Wharton Executives Education program, specifically for women in leadership roles. At this event, the program director had the female attendants describe male versus female authority.
They described female leaders as …
“multi-tasking, emotional, empathetic, strong, intuitive, compassionate, relationship building, verbal, consensus building, collaborative and gossipy”
and they described male leaders as …
“strong, arrogant, intelligent, ego-driven, bravado, powerful, dominant, assertive, single tasking, focused, competitive, stubborn, physical, self-righteous and direct”
The article about this Wharton Executives program goes on to elaborate more on “masculine” versus “feminine” styles of leadership, and the idea that someone can perform “masculine leadership” even if they are not in a biologically male body.
Most sources, including a 2019 Harvard Business Review article by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, distinguish between masculine and feminine leadership as men typically being better at managing processes and women being better at managing people. Essentially, masculine leadership is thought to rely on coercive and authoritative styles, while feminine leadership is based more on affiliative and democratic styles. Though, as Chamorro-Premuzic points out, “these differences are predominantly attributable to cultural constructs, not biological differences.”
Another major distinction: maculine leadership is commonly viewed as more effective, even if actual results would suggest otherwise. Any gender can be a competent leader; being a biological male does not actually predispose someone to handling authority better, but it does make others more inclined to see them as an effective leader. And if a non-male leader does succeed, especially while utilizing an assertive or commanding manner, they will often be seen as imitating a form of masculinity.
There is the question of which style of leadership really is more effective, regardless of who is carrying it out. This “masculine” approach, especially the more coercive it is, has been argued to be worse for a work environment and actually less productive, while the more “feminine” approach to leadership ⏤ democratic, empathetic, relationship-centered ⏤ can be considered more constructive (Goleman). The issue then is, even if the latter style is actually better (which obviously isn’t true 100% of the time; effective leadership techniques do vary across individuals and can be situationally-dependent), “masculine leadership” is still being viewed in a better light. Anyone who performs something different, even if they can produce better results, will be susceptible to more criticism than their traditionally masculine counterparts.
“In this scenario, women will have to out-male males in order to advance in an inherently flawed system,” writes Chamorro-Premuzic. “This would also end up harming the career prospects of men who lack 'traditional' masculine leadership traits but possess the qualities that could potentially make them into great leaders.”
Then of course there is the fact that even if non-male bosses are able to reproduce a form of “masculine leadership,” they are still liable to disapproval because this “form of masculinity” is being performed by someone in a non-masculine body. It’s a catch 22 really: other genders can perform more effectively than men and still be looked down upon for the fact that they are not men; or they can adopt the methods of their male counterparts and be condemned with remarks like “too loud,” “emotional and incompetent,” or “the office bitch.” Whereas in a traditionally masculine body, this directness, anger, and even aggressiveness can be seen as just natural qualities of a leader.
“Men and women can do the same thing, but if they both act assertive, women are rated less effective because we expect men to do that.” - Anne Cummings, former Wharton management professor
So it would seem that men do not need that “buy-in” that Lisa explained is so crucial to her success as a female leader. Instead, masculinity, at least as it is traditionally imagined, carries its own form of validation for leadership, regardless of the individual’s actual strengths or qualifications.
– Savannah Kuchar
Sources:
https://hbr.org/2019/03/as-long-as-we-associate-leadership-with-masculinity-women-will-be-overlooked
https://www.cdfifund.gov/Documents/(51)%20Leadership%20that%20Gets%20Results.pdf
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