Women in Leadership: Context, Dynamics and Boundaries

Citation

Arar, K. (2012), "Women in Leadership: Context, Dynamics and Boundaries", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 33 No. 3, pp. 319-320. https://doi.org/10.1108/01437731211216506

Close to 3,000 books listed on Amazon.com, and innumerable academic and practitioner reports and courses deal with the issue of leadership. However, the study of leadership remains fraught with ambiguity, uncertainty and paradox (Fairhurst, 2007). Although we are fascinated by leadership, believing naively that leaders can solve our problems, this fascination is combined with diminishing confidence that leaders in politics, business, and the church can deliver anything worthwhile (Tourish, 2008). Women in Leadership discusses the future of women's leadership in different contexts, examining women's attitudes towards a leadership career as organizations transform themselves from centralized, structures with clearly defined authority lines to decentralized, networking entities. In today's rapidly changing environment characterized by complexity, ambiguity and unpredictability, context is critically important in shaping women's leadership style.

 Klenke's book describes women's leadership in various contexts. This is the book's unique contribution. The book is divided into 12 chapters exploring different themes, organized according to leadership context domains.

The first chapter indicates the themes that have changed women leaders' expectations: persistence of stereotypes, the gendered nature of organizations; the importance of contexts and women leaders' ability to cross contexts. Perhaps the most consistent common cross‐context thread is the paradoxes that women leaders confront. Klenke argues that:

The context influences what leaders must do and what they can do. A leader's mission and purpose … is partly dictated by the demands and constraints of context (p. 7).

Chapter Two chronicles women's achievements as leaders from ancient civilization till the twentieth century. Women have served in leadership roles in different contexts such as politics, science, and the arts for example: Cleopatra, Messalina, Eleanor Roosevelt.

Political leaders discussed in Chapter 3, often, but not always, derive power and authority from the offices they hold. Klenke's discussion is fueled by Hillary Clinton's candidacy for the 2008 USA presidential elections.

Chapter 4 relates to women as business and corporate leaders. Women's buying power is increasing, offering more leadership opportunities for women. Chapter 5 focuses on the information technology context, while Chapter 6 relates to the mass media in which women feature as either “queens” or “villains”.

Chapter 7 analyzes women's leadership in the context of sports, which although assumed to be gender neutral, is clearly split along gender lines. Chapter 8 describes the hierarchical structure and command‐and‐control leadership style of the military context. Women occupy leadership positions in USA military academies, acting as intelligence analysts and fighter pilots but are excluded from active combat.

The context of the world's religions and churches, discussed in Chapter 9, is defined by cultural views of a supreme being. While there have been numerous female religious leaders, the recent spirituality movement, has yet to produce a female leader.

Chapter 10 features women leaders in the sciences, education and art. The underrepresentation of women leaders in science is evidenced in the Nobel Prize awards, given to more than 300 men, but only to ten women. In education, relatively, few women become institutional leaders. In the arts, large gender gaps still exist with few leading women leaders in each field.

Chapter 11 covers four different global contexts: politics, information technology, sports and Nobel Peace Prize Laureates. In all four contexts, women leaders remain the exception. Significant cultural/political differences across the globe afford different leadership opportunities to women. The chapter explains how some extraordinary women leaders have succeeded immensely despite professional, business and political restrictions.

In Chapter 12 Klenke reflects on her own leadership journey, explaining that while teaching, researching and practicing leadership, she was challenged intellectually by paradoxes and multiple contradictions (p. 248). She concludes:

Women leaders are shaping political, corporate, and social agendas in developed and developing countries around the world; while they bring to leadership different points of views, values, experiences, interests that provide diverse and unique prisms through which they view and approach the tasks and responsibilities of leadership (p. 233).

She describes how women leaders need to continually reinvent themselves, detailing rewards, successes and failures that shape their lives as women and leaders. The book explains how pioneer women employ integrative thought processes to advance themselves and to develop the next generation of effective women leaders, employing hard and soft power to cope with multiple dichotomies: competition – collaboration, globalization‐localization, centralization‐decentralization.

As a leadership in education scholar, I found this book interesting, since it discusses the distinctive contexts of women's leadership, identifying women's leadership qualities and capabilities, and common elements in their journey as women and leaders in different arenas.

Popular literature and media input brings scholarly research face‐to‐face with public perceptions of female leadership, marking women's contribution to leadership theory, research and practice. The book is highly recommended for leadership students, male and female.