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Leadership Preferences: The Influence of Gender and Needs for Connection On Workers' Ideal Preferences for Leadership Behavior

November 26, 2001

" In the new work dynamic, 'job-centered' leadership is being replaced by 'worker-centered' leadership which has the potential to drastically alter the role of an effective leader.  However, insufficient empirical attention has been devoted to determining if workers prefer 'worker-centered' leadership behaviors over the more traditional leadership style.  One reason for this research gap may be that most empirical studies seeking to illuminate effective leadership strategies conceptualize leadership as predominantly a function of leader qualities (Eagly, Johnson, 1990; Eagly, Karau, & Makhigani, 1995).  Consequently, the role of the worker as a fundamental factor in constructing or 'legitimizing' effective leadership is often neglected (Hollander, 1993).  Thus, substantive questions about workers' preferences for particular types of leadership behaviors remain unanswered.

The consistent tendency for researchers to neglect workers' preferences for leadership behaviors is surprising, considering that as early as 1950 Sanford suggested that 'There is some justification for regarding the follower as the most crucial factor in any leadership event' (p.4).  Followers affect the strength of a leader's influence, the style of a leader's behavior, and the performance of the group through which many leadership functions are carried out is critical to workers' production, rewards, morale, and work satisfaction.

To more effectively represent the American working population, our sample was drawn from three different organizations that employed workers classified as administrative support/clerical (13%), sales, business good and services (5%), handler/laborer (13%), administrators (12%), professional service providers (9%), mechanic/repairer (5%), sales/retail (26%), and others (17%).  All 1009 participants were supervised employees.  The demographics of the respondents were similar to the overall demographics of all employees (respondents and nonrespondents) in at least two of the three organizations; data for the third organization were not made available by the organization.

The measures for this study included: Demographic questionnaire, this 13-item questionnaire gather background information of the participant.  Measure of preferred leadership behaviors, the Ideal Preference version of the Leader Behavior Description Questionnaire (LDBQ; Halpin, 1957) was used to assess the degree to which workers preferred the two basic dimensions of leadership behavior, Consideration (worker-centered) and Initiating Structure (job-centered).  The Connectedness Scale (Welch, 1997) was used to assess the degree to which workers experience their needs for connection with others.

A total of 4070 workers from three organizations were informed that the purpose of the study was to examine their ideal preferences for leadership behaviors within their work setting.

With regard to demographic variables, as expected, workers' age and educational level influenced the degree to which workers expressed preferences for worker-centered leadership behaviors.  Not surprisingly, employees within their respective categories were similar with regard to their educational levels and consequently expressed remarkable similar preferences for the degree to which job-centered leadership behaviors were preferred.  These findings tent to suggest that particular jobs within organizations may attract and retain workers with similar needs for structure or may suggest that certain jobs inherently require particular amounts of structured, supervised leadership.

Next, after age and educational levels were accounted for, female workers expressed significantly higher preferences for relationally oriented, worker-centered leadership behaviors than their male counterparts.   In the post hoc exploratory analyses, gender did not emerge as a significant factor in influencing workers' preferences for job-centered leadership which was somewhat expected in light of Ejiogu's (1985) post hoc analyses which suggested that male teachers had slightly stronger preferences for job-centered leadership styles.

Gender differences in needs for connection have been widely assumed but have not been empirically tested; this study is the first study to date that has tested the relationship between gender and connectedness needs in a sample of adult workers.  As expected, our findings indicated that female workers' connection needs were significantly stronger than male workers.

As anticipated, we found that understanding a worker's needs for connections is more relevant than simply knowing his or her gender.  Our results revealed that variations between and among male and female workers in their needs for connection significantly accounted for differences in preferences for worker-centered leadership behaviors.  In fact, when the influence of connectedness needs was accounted for, gender differences were insignificant.  This is particularly relevant in that it helps explain why many male and female workers express ideal preferences for worker-centered relational leadership behaviors.  Given these data, we can move beyond the simple identification of gender differences in leadership preferences by theoretically establishing a reason for the differences, i.e., variations in workers' needs for connection.

It appears that the two types of leadership behaviors examined in our study were complementary and when blended appropriately are preferred by most workers in our sample.  The results presented in this study may provide important considerations for leaders wishing to increase the congruence between workers' preferences for leadership behaviors and their actual leadership behaviors.  Leaders may opt to tailor their supervisor styles in response to their employees' varying needs or ensure that certain employees with particular needs are matched with a leader who will most effectively integrate the workers' preferred leadership behaviors into his or her leadership style.

Because the results of this study indicate that workers have varying degrees of preferences for leaders who are able to offer relational and structured, task-oriented leadership, organizations may alter their criteria for identifying potential effective leaders.  More specifically, instead of seeking out those potential leaders who exhibit the stereotypical leadership traits such as overt strength and authority (Basow, 1992), they may seek to select those who can provide varying degrees of structure within varying degrees of meaningful relational leader-employee connections - dependent upon the individual preferences of the employee.  Knowing that both male and female employees tend to value a relational and task-oriented leader may increase an organization's willingness to bring more relationally oriented potential leaders 'up through the ranks.'

Despite various limitations that exist in this study, the findings provide an often overlooked view of ways in which workers' needs for connections influence their preferences for leaders' behavior.  Ideally, the results presented here will yield some useful insights for leaders interested in customizing their leadership styles to more effectively meet workers' needs (Boatwright & Forrest, 2000, pp.18-34)."

Reference:  Boatwright, K. J. & Forrest, L. (2000).  Leadership preferences: the influence of gender and needs for connection on workers' ideal preferences for leadership behaviors.  The Journal of Leadership Studies, 7(2).

The Journal of Leadership Studies is available on loan from the OSU Leadership Center.  A complete listing of all the Leadership Center's resources is available on our website http://leadershipcenter.osu.edu/

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Created: 2008-02-26, Updated: 2009-02-18