Leadership Style and Gender: A Study of Spanish Cooperatives

Abstract

The growing global need for social cohesion and sustainable development gives visibility to cooperatives because their principles help to achieve these objectives and the adoption of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Among them, gender equality policies are in the forefront. This paper explains how cooperatives contribute to women’s professional opportunities and to balancing the presence of women in management positions. It analyzes the predominant leadership styles and gender differences in cooperatives with a sample of 114 cooperative firms. The results show that: (a) Both transformational and transactional leadership styles are widely used; (b) no significant differences in leadership styles between men and women exist; and (c) the composition of management teams results in significant leadership style differences. The transformational style is less often used in mixed teams with a male majority and a woman president, and most often used in homogeneous teams (made up of only men or only women). Transactional leadership is more frequently implemented in teams made up only of women than in mixed masculine teams with a female president. These findings identify women’s leadership styles in cooperatives, pointing out their difficulties and introducing innovative proposals for contributing to their success and the achievement of SDGs in cooperatives.

Labour Practice, Decent Work and Human Rights Performance and Reporting: The Impact of Women Managers

“…In line with their gender-relevant values, women managers would tend to adopt a transformational leadership style, whereas their male counterparts would exhibit a transactional leadership style (Bass et al, 1996;Reuvers et al, 2008;Stempel et al, 2015). However, empirical evidence shows that both leadership styles are similarly adopted by women and men managers and their use is contingent upon the composition of management teams (homogeneous versus mixed teams) and the work context (Martinez-Leon et al, 2020). In this sense, given that the implementation of initiatives in supporting labour and human rights that go beyond legal requirements implies "transformative changes" in organizational management, it would be favoured by transformational leadership and, consequently, based on the homophily perspective, a higher presence of women in management teams would promote the introduction of such changes, leading to enhanced social performance.…”

Cooperative Entrepreneurship Model for Sustainable Development

“…Cooperatives are organized to engender and sustain multiple benefits for the involved stakeholders and members, while contributing to local sustainable development [9,10]. Cooperatives can play an important role in the implementation of SDGs [11], because the seven cooperative principles contribute to it. Voluntary and Open Membership (First Principle) can contribute to the elimination of poverty (SDG 1) and enforces gender equality (SDG 5); Democratic Member Control (Second Principle) helps reduce inequalities (SDG 10); Member Economic Participation (Third Principle) facilitates the reduction of inequalities (SDG 10) and creates decent work and economic growth (SDG 8); Education, Training and Information (Fifth Principle) can contribute to improving education (SDG 4) by allocating resources endowed with the obligatory reserves destined for this purpose, and Concern for Community (Seventh Principle) works for the sustainable development of communities (SDG 11).…”

Doing Case Study Research Collaboratively: The Benefits for Researchers

“…Originating from social psychological studies in the 1960s NGT method has been used widely when conducting qualitative focus groups in aerospace, social services and environmental studies (Olsen, 2019; Van de Ven & Delbecq, 1972). As a socio-logical model, it seeks to foster creativity and various responses to a specific research question by providing a structured process for gathering information and perceptions of a particular area of interest from a group (Gallagher et al, 1993; Martinez-Leon et al, 2020). Nominal group technique is a method that brings together experts on a given topic to ascertain which issues need further, more in-depth exploration and to identify issues that may have been previously unidentified.…”