Revisiting leadership styles and attitudes towards women as managers in Greece

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to deal with the attitudes towards women as managers, and the leadership style that women managers adopt. By replicating a study that was conducted in 1990, it is intended to explore how things have changed during the last 15 years, in terms of attitudes towards women in management, as well as in terms of the leadership style that each gender tends to apply at work. Design/methodology/approach A longitudinal survey, first run in 1990 and repeated in 2006, with a similar to the original sample of 229 Greek middle managers. Three very popular research scales are used to study the phenomenon: the women as managers scale, the satisfaction with the supervisor and the Likert four types of leadership styles. Findings The 2006 initial findings indicate greater presence of women in managerial positions, and relatively stable attitudes towards women as managers. Satisfaction with supervisor does not appear to be significantly correlated with the managers' gender, while, at the same time, no significant difference appears to exist between the leadership styles that male and female managers adopt. Originality/value This research is unique in drawing on cross‐time, large pool of data, to support the existence of persisting effects in the attitudes towards women as managers, as well as the effect of gender on the satisfaction with supervisor.

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