The topic of leadership has been addressed and applied for millennia. Yet, it is only within the past 80 years that leadership has been a topic of serious discussion. It is important to understand variables relevant to effective leadership. Gender is one such variable that must be examined with regard to optimizing leadership effectiveness. The topic of gender and leadership deserves serious and thoughtful consideration and discussion because of professional, political, cultural, and personal realities of the twenty‐first century. Women and men have been, are, and should be leaders. Gender must be considered to determine how each leader can reach maximum potential and effectiveness. The FourCe‐PITO conceptual framework of leadership is designed to help guide leadership development and education. The present chapter uses this conceptual framework of leadership to discuss how consideration of gender may affect and optimize leadership development and effectiveness. It is the goal of this chapter to lay out the issues that educators of leaders, potential leaders, and “practicing” leaders should be aware of, to achieve success for the good of the groups and individuals they have the responsibility to lead.
Part of the book: Gender Differences in Different Contexts
Leadership and followership development are increasingly recognized as important in all fields of the workforce. The Innovative Leadership Model helps leaders increase self-understanding and optimize the performance of organizations by focusing on Leader Type, Developmental Perspective, Resilience, Situational Analysis, and Leadership Behaviors and Mindsets. The Leader-Follower Framework identifies key elements – Character, Competence, Communication, Context – to guide the development of individual leaders and followers across four psychosocial levels – Personal, Interpersonal, Team, Organizational. Each of these approaches has value and has been applied in various settings and contexts. The present chapter offers a new insight relevant to leadership by combining these two perspectives and their component elements. Understanding and developing each of these elements will optimize effective leadership and followership in a wide range of situations and settings.
Part of the book: Leadership
Empathy is relevant to but not sufficient to fully understand relationships. Recent research has proposed that empathy is part of a continuum—from pity to sympathy to empathy to compassion—and that compassion is the key to building good relationships because it includes actions. We offer an extension of this concept to include neutrality (apathy) and add four constructs of opposition—from antipathy to animosity to hostility to aggression. We describe all nine constructs with regard to cognitive, emotional, and behavioral support or opposition. Further, we propose that it is useful to consider these constructs in terms of character, competence, context, and communication at four psychosocial levels—personal, interpersonal, team, and organizational. We believe that relationships can be best addressed with these concepts in mind and that application of the support versus oppose poles of the aggression-compassion continuum are not equivalent to good and bad.
Part of the book: Empathy