Women's Leadership

Common Understandings: Leadership and Leadership Development 25
how the rules and rituals of organisational life, and of society more
widely, create certain expectations about what leadership and leaders
look like.
Women in leadership: The significance of gender
In the introduction to this book we highlighted that the majority
of studies addressing women and leadership have concentrated on
women leaders’ styles and characteristics. Alternative understandings
of women’s leadership have emerged more recently however, with a
rise in the amount of leadership literature that examines theory and
practice through a gender lens. Research adopting this perspective
encourages us to argue for different models of leadership that reflect
women’s experience and practice. The connective leadership model
advocated by Lipman-Blumen (2000) and the heuristic model of
leadership by Stanford et al. (1995) are examples of work that takes
this approach. A limitation of such work, however, is that it fails to
engage critically with issues of power within organisational settings.
As we have mentioned above, the dominance of masculine norms
of behaviour in the majority of organisational processes and policies
might lead us to question how these models are to be practised
within such organisational frameworks. How, in other words, might
such ways of practising leadership be received in more hierarchically
organised work spaces where rigid divisions of labour apply?
In literature that more specifically addresses the significance of
gender to leadership, the tendency has been to label leadership as either
masculine or feminine in style. These more contemporary ideas about
gender and leadership assert that so-called feminine characteristics
afford women an advantage in contemporary workplaces that
favour more participative and democratic organisational styles
(Wilson, 2003). A strong claim made by these studies is that these
styles are more common among women than men (Eagly and
Johnson, 1990). Other characteristics labelled feminine that are
now deemed significant to encourage organisational change include
co-operation, openness and a caring orientation. These are qualities
that have been associated with women (e.g. Vinnicombe, 1988) and
some researchers have presented them as offering superior ways of
enacting leadership (e.g. Helgesen, 1990; Rosener, 1990). Nevertheless
there appears to be little empirical evidence to support this kind