Gender difference in leadership
Description
For this assignment, I am going to consider two people from my ballet studio. Terri is female and has more typical male leadership traits. Jim is male and has more typical female leadership traits. Terri is the owner and, as described in Rosener (2011), she relies on her power from her position. She’s at the top and makes policy decisions and enforces them with the full weight of her position behind it. She usually does not use personal power to obtain buy-in. Things are transactional—do what I say or sit out (Rosener, 2011). Jim is my men’s technique class instructor. He certainly engages in transformational leadership, like Rosener (2011) described. I know that he would like to teach a very serious and high-level class all the time, but if he sees a boy in the hall (usually a ballerina’s brother) he invites them to class even if they have no experience. He tries to get more boys interested in ballet and having more classmates will, in the long run, be better for my class. I think I am still developing my leadership skills. Right now, I might tend towards a male leadership style because I don’t use interpersonal skills as effectively as I could. Table 10 in Eisner (2013), describes some of these traits like communication, creativity, and being transparent and open (p. 33). Jim uses all sorts of interpersonal skills to invite newcomers to class. Right now, I don’t think I would take the same amount of time that he does, and I would blurt out something like “just come to class, you’ll enjoy it.” From Jim, I can learn to more patiently use interpersonal skills. References Eisner, S. (2013). Leadership: Gender and executive style. SAM Advanced Management Journal, (78)1, 26-41. Rosener, J. B. (2011). Ways women lead. In Leadership, Gender, and Organization (pp. 19-29). Springer Netherlands.
