Female Leadership Styles

Barbara Sveva Magnanelli () and Elisa Raoli ()
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Barbara Sveva Magnanelli: John Cabot University, Business Administration Department
Elisa Raoli: Catholic University of Sacred Heart, SEGESTA

Chapter 4 in Female Leadership and Motherhood, 2026, pp 53-87 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This chapter examines contemporary leadership styles through a gender-responsive and empirically grounded lens, highlighting how women consistently excel across transformational, transactional, empowering, ethical, servant, authentic, inclusive, compassionate, and collaborative leadership paradigms. Recent meta-analytic evidence (Paustian-Underdahl et al., The Leadership Quarterly, 35(6):101822, 2024) demonstrates that women are systematically rated higher on both communal and agentic behaviours that predict effectiveness, challenging traditional stereotypes and revealing a multidimensional leadership profile. Across sectors, including healthcare, education, public administration, and global health, women’s leadership is associated with stronger empowerment, ethical climates, innovation, resilience, and follower well-being, though contextual biases may attenuate these benefits. Each leadership style reviewed illustrates how relational, values-driven, and participatory competencies, often aligned with feminist ethics of care, support complex decision-making and organizational performance. Collective findings underscore that women’s leadership effectiveness is not attributable to essentialized traits, but emerges through integrative approaches that combine vision, accountability, psychological safety, moral integrity, and shared power. However, structural inequities and stereotype-based constraints remain decisive moderators of outcomes. Overall, the chapter demonstrates that contemporary leadership research increasingly converges on a central insight: when institutional contexts enable women’s full expression of diverse leadership styles, organizational and societal gains are substantial, measurable, and enduring.

Date: 2026
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-24990-6_4

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