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Introduction
Twenty-two years ago, Judith Rosener's "Ways Women Lead" was published in the Harvard Business Review. It reported that women tend toward a transformational leadership style based on personal power. Women were described as using that style to motivate followers to change self interest into group interest through shared concern for broader, overarching goals. Rosener reported that men, on the other hand, tend toward a transactional leadership style based on position-based power. Men were described as using that style to leverage subordinate performance through a series of exchanges in which rewards and sanctions are based on the subordinate's work (1990).
Five years later Deborah Tannen published "The Power of Talk: Who Gets and Heard and Why" also in the Harvard Business Review (1995), and her book with parallel content Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work (1995). Tannen's work depicted gender-linked behavior consistent with that reported by Rosener, describing these behaviors as derived from developmental socialization. Tannen reported that working women, as a result, interact in ways centered on relationship, people, collaboration, and furthering rapport. She described working men as interacting in ways centered on power, task, showing their ability and knowledge, challenging others and resisting challenges, and seeking to win.
Some studies in the years since, including the meta-analyses summarized by Gary Powell in Women & Men in Management, have found that effects of gender on leadership style vary based on the contexts within which they are studied. While the overall findings of his review of gender-linked leadership behavior are consistent with those of Rosener and Tannen', Powell in addition concluded that laboratory and field studies may produce different results. Powell reports that fewer gender-linked style differences are found in field studies of actual managers than are found in laboratory studies or studies of nonleaders who are asked how they would behave if they were leaders (Powell, 201 1).
It has been 26 years since a Wall Street Journal article by Carol Hymowitz and Timothy Schellhardt used the term "glass ceiling" (1986). The impact of gender on leadership style appears to be no less salient today than it did to these ground-breaking authors. The number of women who have broken through to executive levels remains relatively small and disproportionate to their...