The Finnish language does not make an explicit difference between leadership and management, In English and in the field of organisational research there is, however a difference between management and leadership. The following definition put forward by Nicholls (1987, 21) describes the distinction:
Management can get things done through others by traditional activities of planning, organizing, monitoring and controlling—without worrying too much what goes on inside people’s heads. Leadership, by contrast, is vitally concerned with what people are thinking and feeling and how they are to be linked to the environment, to the entity and the job/task.
However, this distinction is not always clear in practice or research. Definitions of leadership usually include some kind of influence process (Yukl, 1989) in which the leader influences the follower. However, this kind of simple understanding has been criticised for various reasons. Alvesson (2002, 94) argues that leadership does not entail just a leader acting and a group of followers responding; rather, it is a complex social process in which the meanings and interpretations of what is said and done are significant. According to Hearn (2014, 418), leadership is a more specific term than management, indicating acts and processes of leading. In other words, it shows some direction and initiative.
Management refers to people, i.e., managers who manage and organise, as well as to the wider process of managing, which may involve people, technologies,
systems, etc. According to Alvesson (2002, 101), managers coordinate, plan, control, etc., but they also try to create a commitment to plans, rules, goals and instructions, thus making ‘leadership’ and ‘management’ difficult to differentiate in practice.
The issues of gender and gendering are linked to both management and leadership. For this reason, distinguishing between the two concepts sharply is not necessary in this study. Traditionally, manager and leadership have been constructed in masculine terms (Schein, 1973, 1975). The ideas, ‘think manager, think male’ or ‘think manager, think masculine’ have been identified in a lot of studies on the stereotypes of leadership (e.g., Heilman, 1983, 1995; Schein &
Mueller, 1992; Koenig et al., 2011). However, Collinson and Hearn (1996, 1–4) remarked that although most managers are men, there has been a strange silence on the interrelations between men, masculinities and management. They argue that management literature has consistently failed to question the gendered nature of management, although images of middle and senior management seem to be saturated with particular notions of masculinities. According to Collinson and Hearn (1994), men’s domination of senior positions arises in the many interconnections between particular masculinities and managerial practices, for example, paternalism, entrepreneurialism, careerism and personalism. In practice, both managers and men repeatedly take these asymmetrical power relations for granted, often ignoring the hierarchical nature of organisational life and/or its gendered character (Collinson & Hearn, 1996, 11). As a result, through formal and informal power dynamics the taken-for-granted hegemonic masculinities of management are reproduced (Collinson & Hearn, 1996, 11). This
‘masculine ethic’ (Kanter, 1977, 43) includes characteristics that are assumed to belong to only men: ‘a tough-minded approach to problems, analytic abilities to abstract and plan, a capacity to set aside personal, emotional considerations in the interests of task accomplishment, a cognitive superiority in problem-solving and decision-making’.
However, management and leadership practices and ideals have changed in recent decades and nowadays the preference is that they should not be merely masculine ones. According to Billing and Alvesson (2014, 213), leadership ideals are becoming more ‘non-masculine’. Fletcher (2004) argues that new leadership ideals consist of new and non-masculine labels like post-heroic, shared, and distributed leadership. According to Clegg et al. (2005), how to be a leader is changing, with less of the modern authoritarian leader and more of the postmodern collegiate and facilitatory approach to leadership. Billing and Alvesson (2014, 214) claim that the preferred leadership ideas in recent years are not necessarily ‘pro-women’ or feminine, but they do not fit well with the traditional ideas of the masculine character of the good manager: technocratically rational, aggressive, competitive, firm, and so on. They talk about the idea of a cultural process of masculinisation of leadership ideals. They also see de-masculinisation as a balancing force to the historical and to some extent ongoing domination of men and certain forms of masculinities in leadership.
However, masculine management and leadership have not yet collapsed.
In most organisations and countries, men continue to dominate leadership and management (Hearn 2014, 417), and, for the most part, masculinist attitudes and behaviour tend to continue to exist (Whitehead, 2014, 453). The assumptions and ideas of good leadership are also still masculine (e.g., Klenke, 2011; Katila &
Eriksson, 2013; Powell, 2014). It seems that certain kinds of masculinities are very persistent, especially in management and leadership, although some new models of the leadership ideal are now getting more space. According to Whitehead (2014, 453), one reason for this persistent ideal of masculine leadership is the gender binary, which sustains both masculine and feminine distinctions to some extent throughout all societies. This division is sustained in the workplace through language, stereotypes and culture. The division of labour framed mainly through the public/private divide still places women in care roles and men in positions of authority and leadership (Whitehead, 2014, 453). According to Whitehead (2014, 454), behind the persistence of masculinities in management still lies the unchanging gender binary, in which societies are framed around male and female dualism.
Aaltio-Marjosola and Lehtinen (1998) saw managers with a family as travellers between two worlds. The role of the father has changed, as discussed above, and is moving towards a more caring and active style of parenting, although the caring father does not fit with the mysticism of a leader (Zaleznik 1991) or the masculine paradigm of leadership. Full-time jobs and overtime work are seen as signs of loyalty, dedication and competence (Haas & Hwang, 1995).
This applies especially to leaders, whose distinguishing feature is seen to be working long hours and putting work before other responsibilities, such as family (Kugelberg, 2006). Leadership, as we have already seen, is an area of organisational culture where masculine factors, behaviour and appearance are particularly linked (Alvesson & Billing, 1997). Supporting a certain kind of masculinity in organisations and leadership also reproduces particular assumptions about the roles of fathers and mothers (Calas & Smircich, 1993;
Tienari & Koveshnikov, 2014, 520). If a man’s (or a woman’s) identity does not meet the culturally dominant ideals, it is likely that he or she will inevitably face resistance in the workplace due to these cultural standards (Alvesson & Due Billing, 1997).
Aaltio-Marjosola and Lehtinen (1998) observed that male leaders’ private lives, including fatherhood, have been overlooked in research. One reason why leaders’ fatherhood and their relationships with their children have been less recognised, they say, is the convention of leadership discourse, where the obligations of working life and private life are separated. One phase of Hearn and Niemistö’s (2012) research involved interviews with male and female managers, and the interviews confirmed the persistence of this separation; in their study, father managers very clearly divided their lives into private and public. Aaltio-Marjosola & Lehtinen also found that there is no cultural support for alternative fatherhood in working life. Leaders both grow in this society and are part of the renewal process. For change to come about, the faces of leadership
also need to be modernised (Aaltio-Marjosola & Lehtinen, 1998). Hearn and Niemistö (2012) likewise argue that fathers and managers need to be seen in context. Managers are gendered, and some of them are fathers and mothers.