Women as Managers; How Successful Are They?

Women as Managers; How successful are they?

Do female managers perform better than male managers? In management circles, the answer for this would end up in two extreme dimensions. Certainly the role of women in society and in organizations cannot be ignored anymore. In the context of organizations, they require human resources irrespective of the base of gender and look for efficient and skillful employees to be ahead in the business and grasp the best people available rather than arguing which gender performs better. What organizations should do to identify unique characteristics of managerial capabilities of either gender is to tap the total management potential of its employees and effectively blend them in achieving their mission.

Many academic researches have been published on female leadership qualities and these researches have found some unique leadership characteristics of female managers. Majority of these research findings are from the developed countries. However there is a lack of research material relating to the topic from our part of the world. Findings of these researches indicate that performances of female managers are good as male managers or even better. Male mangers have been recognized to be task oriented while female managers have been recognized to be interpersonal oriented. These findings also revealed that male managers are more autocratic or directive. Further to this, subordinates of female managers have rated them to be more democratic and participative. Research on transformational leadership styles and transactional leadership styles has found male managers to be transactional and female managers to be transformational. Further studies has pointed out that subordinates perform better under transformational leadership than transactional leadership. Thus female managers have been recognized to be highly interactive, participative and information sharing. In addition, research findings indicate that female managers to be proactive than male managers.

One of the famous and a leading author who has published several topics relating to leadership believes that long-term thinking would be a dominant trend of the future and it favors the natural abilities and talents of women. Further he identifies leadership to be a right brain thing. Another finding supports this view where it reveals that men use the left side of the brain to perform tasks while women use both hemispheres of the brain. Another study has identified women to be more attentive to visual cues such as facial expressions, body gestures, tone of voice and the way people look at each other.

Though research findings suggest that female managers do possess some unique qualities, many studies have found that their progress to the higher ranks in management is at a snails' phase. The average earnings of such female managers have been found to be at a low than the average