Both Gender and Personality Play Into Perceptions of Transformative Leadership, and It Seems Women Have a Slight Edge

Is how you’re seen as a team leader impacted by your personality or the fact that you’re a woman? New research helps to understand how both interact when it comes to being perceived as a transformational leader by team members.

According to Finnish researchers Brandt and Edinger, who recently published their findings from an academic setting across 14 years in Gender in Management: An International Journal, sex does indeed matter in leading project teams: “Women tend to be more transformational team leaders than men.”

Five Practices of Transformational Leaders

Transformational leaders have been defined as people who are recognized as “change agents who are good role models, who can create and articulate a clear vision for an organization, who empower followers to meet higher standards, who act in ways that make others want to trust them, and who give meaning to organizational life.”

According to Kouzes and Posner and their book The Leadership Challenge, transformational leadership is based upon “The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership” model, measured by the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI).

• Challenging the Process (Challenging) – such as changing status quo, innovating, risk-taking
• Inspiring a Shared Vision (Visioning) – such as passionately envisioning a future & enlisting others in common values & vision
• Enabling others to Act (Enabling) – such as fostering collaboration & trust & strengthening others
• Modelling the Way (Modelling) – such as leading by example & within organizational values in pursuing goals
• Encouraging the Heart (Rewarding) – such as sharing in rewards and recognition, celebrating accomplishments

Brandt and Edinger indicate that transformational leadership has been connected in previous research with leadership effectiveness, job satisfaction, and higher motivation; and can enhance team learning, team member empowerment, group cohesiveness, and team performance.

Being Perceived as a Transformational Leader

Researchers Brandt and Edinger studied how personality type (as indicated by Myers Briggs) interacts with sex in impacting how members rate a leader’s transformational leadership capabilities within a team context. Measured within six-week project teams in an academic setting, Visioning was deemed less relevant and removed.

The widely-used MBTI measures personality preferences as: extroversion/ introversion; sensing/ intuition; thinking/ feeling; and judging/ perceiving. With the slight exception of thinking/feeling, personality types have been found to be distributed fairly evenly between the sexes.

Gender: Women Are More Transformational

In general, consistent with other meta-analysis studies, but not every single study, the researchers found women leaders received higher ratings in overall transformational leadership – especially in the behaviors of Modelling, Enabling, and Rewarding.

Women were more likely to practice leading by example, fostering collaboration and strengthening others, and celebrating and recognizing the accomplishments of team members as goals are achieved.

Indeed a 2014 Ketchum global survey ranked “leading by example” as the number one attribute important to great leadership, with 57% of people rating women as outperforming men at this trait, as well as 4 other top attributes including “bringing out the best in others.”

Broadly on gender, previous research by Brandt & Laiho, collecting data from 459 leaders and their subordinates across a 14 year period in different industries, investigated whether men and women with similar personalities act differently. Consistent with social role theory, they found that regardless of personality, women were more Enabling whereas men were more Challenging, rated both by themselves and those reporting to them.

Personality: Extraverted Personalities Are More Transformational

Personality influenced leadership perception for both sexes. Brandt & Edinger found that regardless of sex, “extraverted and judging personality types are more transformational leaders than introverted and perceiving ones.”

Extraverted team leaders were rated more Modelling of behavior, Rewarding of accomplishments, and Challenging of status quo than introverted team leaders. The researchers speculate extraverts may have more ease in stepping into short-term project leading roles, and also have a tendency to focus more on other people and give more positive feedback whereas introverts tend to focus and less on feedback, as they often require less themselves.

Previous research by Brandt & Laiho also confirmed extraverted female leaders were seen as more transformational and rewarding than intraverted ones.

Gender & Personality: Gender Impacts How Personality is Perceived

According to Brandt, “some personality types behave in the same way as a leader despite the gender, whereas some personalities act differently.” This also goes for how they’re perceived. In some cases, men and women with similar personality preferences are viewed differently by their team members as well as subordinates.

Among extravert team leaders, women were rated as more Modelling & Rewarding-oriented than their male counterparts, and so overall more transformational.

Being inclined away from extraversion seemed to penalize men more than women. The research found “introverted, sensing, thinking and perceiving female leaders are regarded as more transformational than men with similar preferences.”

The previous research by Brandt & Laiho also showed many areas in which women were rated as more transformational than men with similar personality preferences. They found, “Intuitive women were more Rewarding and scored higher on overall transformational profile than intuitive men. Thinking women were regarded as being more Enabling than thinking men, and finally, judging women were seen as more Enabling and transformational overall than judging men.”

The research also found that how leaders perceive their behavior (self-appraisal) does not always match up with how those they are leading rate it (appraisal). For example, feeling female female leaders evaluated themselves as more Enabling, but subordinates rated thinking female leaders to be more so.

Addressing Your Transformational Leadership Gaps

While the research in many ways indicates a gender advantage for women when it comes to transformational leadership which is worth taking note of, that’s also a dangerous game to rely on, as it keeps us in the realm of gender expectations and it hasn’t yet played out in outcome when looking at company profiles.

Social awareness in leadership “calls for a heightened sensitivity to how one’s behavior, in words and deeds, impacts others.” For this reason, insight into how your gender and personality combine to play into leadership perception matters.

Perception is ultimately perhaps most interesting as an input into helping chart your own leadership development. One take-away for female leaders is an opportunity to experiment with your behavior, no matter your personality, to grow in action and hence identity as a transformational leader.

For example, based on these findings women leaders who are more introverted might be advised to try out more extroverted behaviors – even if less comfortable – such as visibly giving positive feedback, outwardly rewarding accomplishments, and being visible in how you model the values you espouse.

The researchers suggest that all leaders can benefit by enhancing their self-knowledge: “When leaders know how they are perceived by others, they can address their weaknesses and maximize their strengths.”