The Impact of Culture and Gender on Leadership Styles

Diversity in leadership remains one of the most influential topics in management research. The socioeconomic changes and globalization make business teams more gender and culturally heterogeneous, which challenges leaders. Gaining a comprehensive knowledge of diversity assists leaders in overcoming such challenges and effectively and efficiently managing their teams. The problems identified by researchers in the area include inconsistent empirical evidence on leadership style (LS) preferences of distinct gender groups, incomprehensive understanding of how leadership functions in Africa and its comparison to traditional Anglo theoretical perspectives. Additionally, there is an incomplete understanding of gender similarities and differences across different cultures. This research investigates these problems and, in turn, helps leaders improve communication, collaboration and organisational performance. The foundation for this quantitative research is a self-administered online survey. Survey participants are culturally and gender-diverse managers, studying in the MBA program at the University of London. Consequently, two dominant cultural groups, Anglo and Sub-Saharan African (SSA), were categorized and detailedly assessed. This research casts light and establishes connections between gender, culture and leadership. The men in the Anglo and SSA clusters are more transformative than women. Additionally, top management is more transformative compared to non-management, low management is more laissez-faire than top management and non-managerial females are more laissez-faire than top-managerial females. However, no significant differences were found between genders independently of their culture, residents and native-born residents of Anglo and SSA clusters. The key implications of this research are that professionally educated leaders, independent of their gender, use similar LSs. However, within cultural clusters, gender differences emerge. No differences between the residents and native-born residents indicate that foreign-born leaders adapt their style to the residing culture.