Empirical Studies Of Gender Roles And Gender Differences In Leadership Style

The paper examines gender differences in leadership and personality characteristics between male and female managers in Mainland China using empirical research. We use two representative leadships as independent variable: one is Transformational leadership which is popular in western countries; the other is Paternalistic leadership originated from Chinese Societies. The paper is focus on the correlations and differences between sex/gender role of Chinese managers' leaderships. Previous research has shown that, a growing number of scholars and experts think that female managers are highly interactive, collaborative leadership, however, male managers are highly task-oriented and pay attention to power. My research will found the relations between different gender role with transformational leadership and paternalistic leadership.The data used in this study were collected from three different universities in Beijing and Shanghai, which contained 172 students of MBA and in-service graduate student. The questionnaires has 160 valid responses for a 93 per cent response rate. The result of Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) showed that four dimensions of transformational leadership and four dimensions of authoritarian leadship have been proved. Through empirical analysis, it is found that Androgyny had a great influence on transformational leadership; masculinity individual had a great influence on Paternalistic leadership. Feminine characteristics were positively correlated with transformational leadership style than Masculine characteristics, while Masculine characteristics were positively correlated with Paternalistic leadership style, Feminine characteristics negatively correlated. Sex role had not a great influence on Transformational leadership or Paternalistic leadership.