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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of gender on the effectiveness of transformational leadership. Drawing on role congruity theory, it elucidates the moderating effects of leader gender, subordinate gender, and leader-subordinate gender dyad on the relationship between transformational leadership and psychological empowerment.

Employees of companies in Korea responded to a paper-pencil survey, rating their psychological empowerment and leadership behaviors of their direct leader on a five-point Likert-type scale. The analysis includes 339 responses.

The results indicate that a leader’s gender has no significant moderating effect on psychological empowerment, but the gender of the subordinate has a significant moderating effect, with male subordinates more strongly influenced by transformational leadership than female subordinates. Notably, the findings show that the effectiveness of transformational leadership is contingent on the leader-subordinate gender dyad. Specifically, transformational leadership has as significant an effect on female leader-male subordinate dyads as on male leader-male subordinate dyads.

This study contributes to leadership and gender studies in the management field by investigating the effect of gender roles on the effectiveness of transformational leadership. Future research should extend this study and explore whether these findings are generalizable.

The remarkable finding of the effect of female leadership on employee empowerment suggests organizations should use more female leaders.

This is the first empirical study to shed light on gender issues in relation to transformational leadership in Korea.

The purpose of this study is to develop and empirically test a conceptual model based on the culturally endorsed implicit leadership theory to comprehend differences in the relationships between consideration, and initiating structure leadership styles and affective organizational commitment for U.S. and Korean employees. Further, we investigate how rank and seniority moderate the relationships between the two leadership styles and affective organizational commitment in both countries.

We developed and conducted a cross-sectional survey in the U.S. and Korea. To test our hypotheses we performed a series of hierarchical regression analyses.

Survey results from 452 U.S. and Korean employees show that the positive relationship between consideration leadership (i.e. people-oriented leadership) and affective organizational commitment was stronger among U.S. employees than Korean employees. Initiating structure leadership (i.e. task-oriented leadership) was negatively related to affective organizational commitment in the U.S., whereas this relationship was positive in South Korea (henceforth Korea). Further, these relationships were moderated by rank and seniority in Korea, but not in the U.S. Specifically, the positive relationship between consideration leadership and affective organizational commitment was stronger when Korean employee’s rank was higher and seniority was shorter.

The comparative nature of our study enables us to identify differences in the effects of leadership styles on affective organizational commitment across countries and thus helps us to better understand employees from different cultures. Furthermore, we demonstrate the differential effects of demographic variables such as rank and seniority in the relationships of leadership styles and affective organizational commitment. The findings provide important managerial recommendations for how managers can better lead U.S. and Korean employees.