Leadership and Gender Differences--Are Men and Women Leading in the Same Way?

In this chapter, we aim to highlight the main gender differences in terms of leadership, to provide a critical comparative analysis, to discuss potential barriers that need to be overcome, and to find some ways of increasing organizational performance through a better leadership style. The focus will not be placed on the gender differences by themselves but on the ways these differences can positively influence the organizational performance. Our proposed chapter is mainly based on literature review as a methodology in its own right. Since literature review has revealed quite many divergent opinions, we also used questionnaires and interviews as data collection tools and we intend to present some of our results, without aiming to generalize all these results to different cultures. We cannot conclude that men's leadership skills are more powerful and more important than women's skills or vice versa, but it is clear that gender differences do exist and people should capitalize on them. We consider the word 'complementary' is better than the word 'different' when talking about leadership styles and that it is possible for leaders to develop a series of skills that are not necessarily traditionally linked to their own gender.