Running Header: MALE AND FEMALE LEADERSHIP

Male and Female Leadership

[Name of Organization]

Male and Female LeadershipIntroduction

Leadership and management should go hand in hand. An organization which conducted with leadership and management has shown well performance in quality, productiveness and efficiency amongst subordinates. (Kotter & Cohen, 2002) Gender is a powerful role, which is not only important in our daily lives, but also in the organizations where people work. Either man or woman, humans are provided with either masculine or feminine qualities which can impact the way we identify our body of work. Gender in management has an impact on how organizations not only fail, but also prosper and should be considered since there are differences between the managerial styles. This acknowledgement matters when it comes to the issue of gender in management, which is concerned with how men and women manage and lead differently, because of their way of socializing differs. (Linstead et. al., 2004) Much of corporate management positions are held by men, but that trend has been changing in recent years. More and more women are employed in senior positions in organizations. This situation raises the question, are their differences in leadership style between men and women? This question of the difference in men and women leadership style is the basic purpose of this paper.

Discussion

Leadership

Leadership is the act of guiding, molding, and moving an individual, a team, or an entire population. A leader provides guidance to a particular pathway, and has most likely chosen that pathway because of her experiences. A leader defines what shape a person or an organization will take on the future, and molds the organization based on what shapes have appealed to or been successful for her in the past. A leader moves, encourages, supports, and has vision for change, movement, and growth because of the growth they've already walked through. A leader is a product of their environment, experiences, culture, gender, education, traits, ethics, and beliefs and therefore as a result, the act of leadership is an implementation of the intrinsic likes and dislikes, observations, trials, and lessons from their life. And for some of us, standing at the front and pointing which direction we should be going, comes naturally.

A leader is simply a follower who takes their experience, skills, and ideas and applies them at a new level providing vision and direction. Greenleaf (2008) captures this idea when he writes, “the servant-leader is a servant first.” Most leaders start out as followers and while a follower, they experience how systems work, how processes succeed or fail, and they even develop opinions about policies and procedures of their own organizations. When followers become leaders, they don't forget those experiences and typically some of their first leadership goals and actions reflect that learning. Greenleaf (2008) spoke to our human inclination to build on our experiences when he wrote, “one does not awake each morning with the compulsion to reinvent the wheel.”

A manager, on the other hand, directs, assigns, and keeps track of the details. A manager implements ...