According to a new study carried out by Norwegian researchers, effective leadership can be measured by five distinct personality traits – and in four out of the five traits, women typically score higher than men.
Professor Øyvind L Martinsen, head of leadership and organisational behaviour at the BI Norwegian Business School, and his colleague, Professor Lars Glasø, surveyed more than 2,900 managers in search of leadership personality traits. These included the ability to withstand job-related pressure and stress; being open to new experiences; taking initiative and being highly communicative; and supporting and accommodating employees.
In the study, female leaders scored higher than men in initiative and clear communication, openness and ability to innovate, sociability and supportiveness, as well as methodical management and goal-setting.
“Our results indicate that women naturally rank higher, in general, than men in their abilities to innovate and lead with clarity and impact,” says Martinsen. “These findings pose a legitimate question about the construction of management hierarchy and the current dispensation of women in these roles.”
The research suggests that women fall behind men in emotional stability and the ability to withstand job-related pressure and stress. But, says Glasø, despite female leaders being more prone to emotional vulnerability, organisational decision-makers could be shooting themselves in the foot by ignoring the findings: “They could effectively be employing less qualified leaders and impairing productivity.”
Informal flexible working boosts job satisfaction
A study from Cass Business School and Cranfield School of Management has confirmed that flexible working can increase employee job satisfaction and organisational commitment – but suggests the way it is delivered can determine its effectiveness.
Researchers surveyed 2,665 UK employees in four private sector organisations with established flexible working practices, drawing on the relationship between flexible working arrangements designed to accommodate employee needs (such as remote working or flexi-time) and performance appraisals.
They analysed whether flexible working practices were set up through a formal policy or an informal negotiation between the employee and line manager, and studied the indirect effects of flexible working on staff performance via job satisfaction and organisational commitment.
Employees who established flexible working arrangements through informal discussion tended to perform better than those who used formal flexible working arrangements.
While both types of arrangement had a positive association with satisfaction and commitment, informal arrangements were more successful in terms of individual performance, because they were seen to stimulate reciprocal behaviours such as loyalty, attendance and punctuality.
“Giving employees the opportunity to work more flexibly gives them more autonomy over their working lives and this gives them a sense of job satisfaction and loyalty to their employer,” says report co-author Professor Lilian de Menezes.
Paying for performance
Performance-based pay is often presented as a form of organisational best practice, but a new paper presented at the CIPD Applied Research Conference suggests that employee roles can be a key factor in determining whether workers will benefit from such reward strategies.
Researchers Dr Mark Williams and Dr Ying Zhou explored the uneven diffusion of performance-based pay across occupational groups in the British labour market, and discovered that the way such pay was allocated differed by occupation. Higher managerial and professional occupations boasted the highest instances of performance-based pay, with roughly twice as many instances as less-skilled professions.
Despite performance-based pay regularly being treated as a ‘best practice’ to be applied uniformly throughout companies, the study found that businesses often tailor it to specific groups of employees. Performance-based pay is more likely to be used where the monitoring of work is difficult, or where specialist knowledge is important.
The researchers suggest that employers examine the payment systems implemented across occupational groups within companies, and perform formal job analysis to determine theoretically important factors – such as job complexity, knowledge requirements and the number of employees supervised – before deciding whether performance-based pay could support the achievement of individual, team and organisational objectives.