Communication Profile of Women Leaders in Finland

The working life is slightly changing towards more equality between genders and role of women at charge is increasing. Plenty of studies have concentrated about men leaders due to available data, but the need to study women leaders have increased. In order to know more about women leaders this study focuses on communication style of the Finnish women leaders. The data was collected altogether from 164 women leaders. Finnish women leaders are using Enabling and Modelling transformational leadership style and having tendency to use Emphatic and Self-Controlled communication style. Results also indicated that highly transformational women leaders communicate differently than less transformational women leaders. Several statistically significant results emerged indicating that those highly transformational leaders are using more Impatient, Self-Controlled, Dominant and Clear communication styles than less transformational women leaders. The results and their applicability in the leadership training are discussed. © 2021 Proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Management, Leadership and Governance, ECMLG 2021. All rights reserved.

Why it's a good practice: Overall, Finnish women who have highly effective transformational leadership behavior has different communication profile than the un-effective transformational leaders. Those effective leaders seem to be impatient, self-controlled, dominant and clear in their communication. This creates a picture of efficient, insightful, straight spoken and professional leaders who succeed in their positions very well. According this study, when concerning education and training of the women leaders, there could be emphasizing the tools and development methods for controlling emotions and also, surprisingly, impatient and dominant communication style. According to this study, these are important communication qualities for successful Finnish women leaders. Those are related to traditional masculine traits, so it seems that leaders need both qualities (masculine and feminine). Even the individuals would develop their behavior the organizations and societies should develop themselves too. Raising the importance of feminine behavior at the organizations and leadership would be important, in order to get appreciation also for the feminine qualities, which have noted to produce increased results and also to get more variety on leadership. As a limitation it should be noticed, that the study uses convenience sample and the results are based on the self-appraisals. It may be that subordinates’ or supervisors’ appraisals would have produced different outcomes, for example, that subordinates regard highly transformational leaders more emotional and not so self-controlled. Thus, it would be important to study this area more and include different perspectives.

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