Are Women Better Leaders?

A Study in Leadership: Women Do It Better Than Men

“It is a well-known fact that women are underpresented at senior levels of management and the leadership styles largely vary between men and women.

A research analysis conducted by Dr Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, 7,280 leaders revealed the truth about men and women leaders in the workplace. The dataset came from the most successful and progressive organisations in the world for both in public & private sectors.

These datas are based on the 16 competencies of the Extraordinary Leader Assessment and derived from 360 evaluations of each leader leadership effectiveness, feedback of their leaders, peers, bosses and direct reports.

A few findings are:

• 64% are still men
• The higher the level, the more men there are
• 78% of top managers were men, 67% at the level below

These data are based on the 16 competencies of the Extraordinary Leader Assessment and derived from 360 evaluations of each leader leadership effectiveness, feedback of their leaders, peers, bosses and direct reports.

Although there were more males in the study, the results are rather clear and quite shocking. Women were rated higher in 12 out of 16 competencies. The higher the level, the wider that gap grows.

(Image Credit: Zenger Folkman) 

Men outscored women marginally on one management competence in this survey – the ability to develop a strategic perspective.

Women have an advantage in important areas of interpersonal such as communications and people relationship. The research study by Zenger and Folkman seemed to demonstrate strongly that women are seen as better leaders than men by those around them.

There are also other studies indicating that companies that have a higher representation of women in management ranks are more profitable and have higher employee productivity.

So, what does this mean for women in the workplace? The research findings are quite telling, and the data suggests that by including more competent women leaders the overall effectiveness of the team would go up.

“Organizations go outside to recruit effective leaders when in many cases they may well have internal people who could rise to fill the position that is vacant.” Joe Folkman added.