Female Leaders And

Transformational Leadership
Management Essay
For assignment help please contact
at help@hndassignmenthelp.co.uk or hndassignmenthelp@gmail.com
As the number of females in management level increase in recent years, their
leadership style and the subordinates' behavior are worth investigated. Among all
leadership styles, most female leaders choose transformational leadership. As stated
by Powell (2004), when female leaders use transformational leadership style, they
will be evaluated more favorably than male leaders. The reason behind is that
transformational leadership is more associated with the feminine than masculine
gender stereotype. The women transformational leaders also develop different
behavior in trust and lead to different team effectiveness and organizational
citizenship behavior (OCB).
Transformational leadership
The concept of transformational leadership was first introduced by Burns
(1978) [ii] stating that transformational leadership is a process which "leaders and
followers help each other to advance to a higher level of morale and motivation".
Bass (1985) [iii] further developed Burns's concept that transformational leadership
entailed establishing oneself as a role model by gaining followers' trust and
confidence. Transformational leaders state future goals, develop plans to achieve
those goals, and innovate, even when their organization is generally successful.
Transformational leaders are idealized that they are a moral example of working
towards the benefit of the team, organization and community.

Bass (1985) theorized that transformational leadership comprises four dimensions:

individualized consideration, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation and
idealized influence. Individualized consideration is the leader's role towards the
followers and concerns their needs. The leader gives support and empathy to
followers so as to motivate them to accomplish the tasks. Intellectual stimulation is
about the leader's attitude towards creativity and risks. Transformational leaders are

willing to take risks and encourage followers to think independently and creatively.
They think that the unexpected situations are the opportunity to learn. Inspiration
motivation concerns the extents of leaders motivate the followers by giving them a
clear vision to follow. When the followers understand the vision, they are willing to
pay more effort in completing tasks and consequently bring benefits to the team and
company. Idealized influence is that leaders provide a role exemplar to followers
demonstrating their ability and ethics to gain respect and trust of them.
The four dimensions of transformational leadership are widely used in measuring
transformational leadership. This leadership style concerns to influence followers to
work better and eventually lead to intrinsic motivation towards the tasks. As this
kind of leadership is always perceived as effective, it is becoming popular in the
business industry as well as government.
Female Leaders and transformational leadership
It was obvious that women were not favor in filling high-level leadership position.
Gary Yukl (2010) [iv] suggested that this phenomenon was due to the gender-based
discrimination about men were more qualified than women for leadership roles and
involves three main assumptions. These assumptions were about traits and skills
required for effective leadership in organizations, about instinctive differences
between men and women, and about the appropriate behavior for men and women.
These hindered women from holding important and high-level leadership position in
early years.
However, the portion of women in executive level is increasing in recent years.
Cookburn (1991) [v] suggested that stereotypes of women include kindness,
compassion, nurturing and sharing lead to a higher concern for women regarding
interpersonal relationship and consensus building. These unique characteristics
bring women to high-level positions in company. And also due to these special
attributes, women are more likely to choose transformational leadership style.
Women are always strong at showing the individualized consideration to followers.
As they concern the interrelationship between people, they will undoubtedly show
their support and empathy to the subordinates for the benefit of themselves and the
whole team. The evidence is given by Eagly & Johannessen-Schmidt (2002) [vi] that
women were rated higher than men in most aspects of transformational leadership.
As a result, women using transformational leadership style are perceived easier to
bring to the success of teams.

Trust
Trust between leader and subordinate is a key element of a team success. Rousseau,
Sitkin, Burt, & Camerer (1998) [vii] defined trust as "a psychological state comprising
the intention to accept the vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the
intentions or behavior of another". Trust is important in some perspectives like
reduction of harmful conflict and promotion of effective responses to crisis
(Rousseau et al. 1998). For a company, it is crucial for employees' trust in the leader
in explaining the visions and motivates employees to support the organization
(Howarth, & Rafferty, 2009) [viii] . Moreover, some studies (Sandy, & Uma 1994;
Perry, & Mankin, 2004) [ix] xindicated that the gender of leaders and subordinates is
an important factor in perceived behavior. Therefore, understanding the trusting
behavior of subordinates to a women leader can help on the better development of
team and company.
Trust and gender
The difference between women and men in interdependence is that women are more
relationally interdependent while men are more collectively interdependent (Gabriel
& Gardner, 1999) [xi] . The article states that women place more emphasis on
relationships and interpersonal connections, while men are more likely to emphasize
more depersonalized group memberships and the importance of group identity. This
can attribute to the nature and way of bringing up of women. Women are always by
nature more sociable. They are more removed and protected than are men from
many of the unpleasant aspects of human nature (Wrightsman, 1974) [xii] . They are
brought up with more concern about care and built up good relationship with others.
This socialization process trains women to assume the best or to think well of people.
So, as a result, women consider the relationship with people more than men do.

In some studies (Schwieren and Sutter, 2004 [xiii] ; Slonim, 2004 [xiv] ), the
difference of trusting behavior between men and women is not significant. In a trust
game by Eckel and Wilson (2004) [xv] , the result indicated that women trust less
than men. But this is limited for the decisions made during the game. In normal
condition, the gender has no effects on trust. Nevertheless, it can be deduced that
women will trust the individuals with good relationship. They think that the one they
rely on will act for the best of them. However, Maddux and Brewer
(2005) [xvi] stated that although women may have actually trusted the relationship

target more than men, they are less likely to make risky decision. That is, from the
decision point of view, women will not take the risk and rather choose a safe option.
This is not related to the matter of trust.
Trust and transformational leadership
The basic theory of transformational leadership posits trust as a central feature of the
relationship that leaders have with their followers, and assume that it is through the
follower's trust in their leader (Bennis & Nanus, 1985) [xvii] . This behavior of trust
motivates the followers to perform better and beyond the expectations. In recent
meta-analysis on trust and leadership, Dirks & Ferrin (2002) [xviii] reported that the
transformational leadership is a strongly predictive of trust. The evidences are given
by other researchers (Bennis et al. 1985; Butler, Cantrell, & Flick, 1999 [xix] ; Conger,
Kanungo, & Menon, 2000 [xx] ).
Back to the four dimensions of transformational leadership, the researchers (Bennis
et al. 1985; Butler et al. 1999; Conger et al. 2000) found that they all enhance trust
between leaders and subordinates. Individualized consideration concerns about
communication between leader and subordinates, understanding of needs and
capabilities and developing subordinates' strengths, which can demonstrate the care
of leader about them. As a consequence, trust will build between both parties.
Intellectual stimulation reinforces the leader's commitment to the development of
the subordinates as well as the team, hence trust is built. Leader motivates and
focuses subordinates' efforts on tasks and goal, which is considered as inspirational
motivation, can increase the trust level of both sides. Finally, idealized influence of
leader shows the integrity and competence. Subordinates rely on the behaviors of
leader and determine whether their leader is trustworthy. So, in general,
transformational leaders are always perceived as trustworthy and easy to gain trust
from subordinates.
Impact of trust and women transformational leaders on team effectiveness
Trust in the leader is associated with the effort employees put into work (Dirks, &
Ferrin. 2002) [xxi] . The more effort employees put into work can be regarded as
higher effectiveness of the leader. Gomez & Rosen (2001) [xxii] reported that team
members' trust in their leader would be positively associated with the perceptions of
leader's effectiveness. Therefore, the higher degree of trust on the leader, the better
effectiveness them team will be.

Women as leaders are always perceived as less effective than men (Eagly, Karau,
Makhijani, 1995) [xxiii] . Eagly et al. (1995) found that male managers were more
effective than women managers in positions that required strong task skills, while
women managers were more effective in positions that required strong interpersonal
skills. This finding is consistent with the previous statement of Wrightman (1974)
that women are strong at and concern relationship with people. It can be predicted
that for a position that required strong interpersonal skills and a female
transformational leader has good relationship with subordinates, the trusting
behavior will enhance the team effectiveness.