284 Part 3 Group and Organizational Communication
Culture and Group Leadership
As you’ll recall from Chapter 3, culture can strongly shape the way people inter-
act. Let’s look at two issues—gender and cultural variations—that prove to be
particularly powerful factors when leading a group.Gender and Leadership
Would you vote for a female presidential candidate? A 2013 poll shows 86 per-
cent of Americans think the country is ready to elect a woman president. And
nearly 75 percent think the country will elect one in 2016 (Fox, 2013). But why
the concern over a leader’s biological sex? Is there really a difference between men
and women as leaders?
With a few key exceptions, research has provided little support for the popu-
lar notion that men and women inherently lead differently, although the idea
has nonetheless persisted. For example, we might assume that men would have
a masculine style of leadership, emphasizing command and control, whereas
women would have a feminine style of leadership, emphasizing more nurturing
relationship environments. Some research has indeed suggested that feminine
leaders think of organizations as webs of relationships, with leaders at the center
of the web, in contrast to the more traditionally masculine view of organizations
as pyramids with a leader at the top. Feminine leaders may also view the bound-
aries between work and personal life as fluid and may communicate their under-
standing of employees’ need to balance professional and personal obligations
(Helgesen, 1990; Mumby, 2000; Rosener, 1990). However, meta-analyses (which
examine the combined results from many different studies) have found that men
and women do not differ in overall leadership effectiveness (Eagly, Karau, &
Makhijani, 1995). In fact, one study (Rutherford, 2001) even notes that men
and women’s leadership styles are often dictated by factors other than sex and gen-
der, such as the general communication style of the group or organization.Cultural Variations
Two additional leadership factors are the variations we see among cultures, such
as whether they are high or low context or value high or low power distance.
You may recall that people from high-context cultures (such as Japan) tend to
communicate in indirect ways, whereas those from low-context cultures (like
the United States) communicate with more verbal directness (Hall, 1976).
Imagine, for example, a manager tasked with keeping a team on target to meet
a very tight deadline. A leader from a high-context culture might simply pre-
sent a calendar noting due dates and filled with tasks and competing projects;
she would rely on her team to get the point that the deadline is in trouble and
expect team members to offer solutions. A leader from a low-context culture,
on the other hand, would be more likely to clarify the situation directly: “I’m
moving the deadline earlier by two weeks; that means you’ll need to accelerate
your work accordingly.” The ways in which group members respond will also be
influenced by culture: group members from a high-context culture might com-
municate in a similarly indirect way with their leader (“We have some concerns