WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP QUALITY

4. WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP QUALITY

According to modern theory on the quality of women’s leadership, which is based on today’s reality, women are seen by many as having potential female attributes including collaboration, ailiation and nurturing. These characteristics are particularly relevant to modern day organizations, which emphasize people skills and cohesive collaboration of business strategies. The article written by Roz Morris shows how popular this view has become. According to Grant’s quotation from Professor Cary Cooper “women are socialized to manage people and relationships in the home, and now they are taking their skills from the home and transferring them to the workplace”. The argument is supported by John Harvey Jones in his book Making It Happen: “The emergence of more women at senior positions will, I believe, be of immense help to industry…Women seem

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to me to have better intuitive capabilities and a deeper, inbuilt sense of fundamental responsibility. They are prepared to stick with details longer than men and to ensure

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that things are actually done right”.

A study in 1999 by Korn Ferry identiied women managers as empathetic, supportive, relationship-building, power-sharing and information-sharing team players, whereas

male managers were characterized as risk-taking, self-conident, competitive, decisive and direct. Half the CEO respondents to this survey also said that the characteristics shown by women, particularly their readiness to share power and information, were also the qualities needed by managers of the future. Studies on the leadership attributes of women in universities in Malaysia conducted by the Association of Commonwealth Universities, have found that women are more consultative and conciliatory, avoiding conlict, and more likely to be task-oriented than their male colleagues.

Besides these views, the position of women as leaders is also open to criticism and controversy. For example, John Adair in his book Great Leaders says that: “There are women, for example, who lack both intuition and a sense of responsibility. Courage and aggressiveness, on the other hand, are by no means uniquely male characteristics”. Whatever the leadership qualities possessed by women, they are now entering managerial ields. They lead organizations and are involved in major decision-making, at least in middle management or administration. The correlation between women’s leadership styles and characteristics, and the leadership styles and characteristics which organizations need to face challenges in the new globalized context, have not to date been translated into an advantage in terms of women holding positions at the higher levels. Citing a UNESCO report, it is found that “With hardly an exception, the global picture is one of men outnumbering women at about ive to one at middle management level and at about twenty to one at senior management level”.

Much has been written to identify and analyze the causes of the signiicant under- representation of women at senior and leadership levels of organizations. All over the world, legislative and programmatic structures have been put in place both to dismantle the barriers to sex in organizations and to counteract their negative efects. Even then progress towards greater opportunity for women in management and leadership has been far slower than expected.