Gender Stereotypes In Transactional Leadership

Gender has long been a topic of interest to academics and within organizations, and has often been a point of contention in relation to organizational management and hierarchies. In Western society, leadership roles were traditionally held by men in most sectors until the middle of the last century, and today, though they are now more likely to obtain education and experience equal to their male counterparts, Western women remain proportionately underrepresented in many sectors. For both men and women at work in the public and private sector today, particularly those holding or pursuing positions of leadership, stereotypes persist which may present challenges to their professional career.

The existence of gender stereotypes and biases is

In the same vein as the theories of classical Scientific Management, Transactional Leadership operates under the assumption that people are motivated to meet goals by tangible rewards such as money. As the name suggests, transactional leaders bargain with employees to give them X (a certain number of hours worked, for example) in exchange for Y (i.e. a bonus check). Transactional leaders very often employ punishments to discourage undesirable behaviors, due again to the belief that workers are driven by a clear set of returns and by the threat of loss of potential rewards.

Transactional leaders are characterized as “generally passive” (Gennaro 2) and reactive, preferring to establish this relationship and to then step back and allow employees to carry on, managed by the expectation of rewards or punishments based on their performance; this requires less day-to-day active management beyond establishing and reinforcing

Leaders then rely on the strength of their relationship with subordinates in order to motivate them. This relationship is achieved by taking an interest in the subordinate as an individual beyond that of an employee. Once a connection is built, Transformational Leadership theory supposes that workers will hold the leader in high esteem and therefore by incentivized to please them, or even to seek their express approval. Transformational leaders also utilize their charisma to inspire their workers and to encourage change and innovation of practice with the goal of transforming organizations into ones more successful organization.

At first glance the preceding representations of these two leadership theories appear to align each with a corresponding gender based on existing stereotypes and cultural associations. Through further examination it becomes every more clear that the aforementioned stereotypes associated with men and women correspond, respectively, with the traits attributed to each