Leadership Styles of Managers from the Perspective of Gender

Abstract

The main objective of the study is to find out whether there are any statistically significant differences in the assessment of the selected leadership attributes between managers from the perspective of gender. A differential analysis was conducted on the sample of 129 respondents (55 male managers – 42.6% and 74 female managers – 57.4%) on the basis of the data collected by means of two methodologies for detecting the leadership behavior attributes: Managerial Grid (Blake and Mouton, 1964) and the new original methodology PALEQ (Paternalistic Leadership Questionnaire). The results of the analyses confirmed the existence of statistically significant differences between male and female managers in assessing the individual leadership attributes. Based on these results, it can be concluded that in terms of the assessment of leadership behavior, male managers use the authoritarian forms of leadership more extensively, whereas female managers are more oriented at the lenient, clement leadership behavior, as compared to the male managers.