What the Research Shows
A common thread among all six presidents interviewed for this story is an awareness of their own leadership styles and a perception that a woman’s leadership style is usually different from that of a man. But a willingness to take risks may better determine whether a college president will be successful, according to the results of a survey by Dr. James. L. Fisher and Dr. James. V. Koch, and the dissertation of Dr. Alice R. McAdory, director of admissions at Old Dominion University.
Fisher, president emeritus of Towson University, and Koch, president emeritus of Old Dominion, asked experts in higher education to designate their sample of 700 presidents as successful and effective or not. Together with McAdory, who used the data in her 2004 dissertation “Transactional and Transformational Leadership Styles: Differences Between Representative and Peer Nominated Effective Presidents and as a Function of Gender and Institution Type,” they evaluated the results.
The three researchers discovered, not surprisingly, that the most successful presidents were entrepreneurial risk-takers with a “take charge” style of management. What surprised them is that women college presidents were about 10 percent more likely to upset the status quo.
“Women are more inclined to take risks and more inclined to ‘think out of the box,’ to use a stale metaphor,” Koch says. “Women are a little more open to individuals who do not necessarily agree with them and individuals who are culturally different. That said, a lot of the differences cited in feminist literature about how women manage, we didn’t find to be true at all. Their behavior is really more like men. Women presidents who are considered by outsiders as being most successful, these women were individuals who tended to reflect stereotypical men: driven, not consensus minded.”
Koch acknowledges, however, that both male and female college presidents see themselves as consensus-building, transformational leaders. The reality, he says, is that “action is different from rhetoric. Most college presidents talk about taking risks but not so many of them actually do it. They’re fairly conservative in terms of behavior, rather transactional in approach.”
