Understanding Male, Female and Androgynous leadership styles

It’s an utter myth that leaders are only born and not made along the cycle of life. Leaders have emerged from a plethora of varied situations, but the common factor that these leaders share is the drive to be self-motivated and learn from experience, irrespective of its success or failure. Over time, leadership has evolved just like any industrial sector or a budding child would. And with evolution, several leadership styles have been brought to the surface that people can now consider a certain “style” to practice leadership.

Here are three important yet debatable leadership styles which I think are as important as any other style of leadership. In this article, let’s understand what Male, Female, and Androgynous leadership styles entail and how they can be practiced.

Most companies adopt a male leadership style ignoring some of the important traits of the female leadership style that would help them perform better. However, embracing certain traits of the feminine leadership style such as empathy, team-styled work, and effective communication in the workplace has proven to be constructive. The feminine leadership style is not only practiced by the female gender but is adopted by businesses where these traits have been observed to be the most productive.

The male leadership style includes traits such as assertiveness, risk-taking, and competitiveness. It is seen that most female leaders also practice the male leadership style, which is autocratic and result-oriented. There are a few differences and many similarities between male and female leaders. Until recently, the leadership roles have been occupied predominantly by men and therefore accepted as the most effective. This led to women also practicing the male leadership qualities in order to achieve the leadership roles.

Most women practice the male leadership style as it has been in practice for a long time and is considered to be more effective and result-oriented and thereby portraying the female leadership style as less successful. Female leaders feel more pressure than their male counterparts to prove themselves to be good leaders, and hence adopting traits from the female leadership style may seem to be a huge risk. Certain female leadership traits like empathy are stigmatized and are considered to be a weakness and thus cannot easily be employed by the leaders, be it male or female. A Female leadership style can also not be employed completely by certain organizations where male leadership proves to be more beneficial.

However, embracing qualities from both leadership styles would give better results as not much can be achieved only by male or female leadership styles. The word Androgynous means the mixture of traits originally deemed to be only masculine or feminine. However, the Androgynous leadership style does not mean that both the masculine and feminine leadership traits are employed equally. Androgynous leadership style can result in high performance in the organizations when it is interchangeable and adaptable as certain situations plead more feminine traits than masculine and vice versa. Typically a male leader is considered to be intimidating, rational, and assertive. But an Androgynous leader would also possess qualities such as concern, patience, and compassion and will be able to apply the required trait in order to achieve the best results.