Leadership That Matters

Chapter

TWELVE

Issues in Leadership: Implications for Transformational Leaders

There are enough “special issues” in leadership to fill several books. Certain issues, however, stand out to us. The four issues we will examine in this chapter are clearly important: women’s leadership, how empowerment works, uncertainty and ambiguity in organizations, and globalization. Moreover, each has an important connection to transformational leadership.

The first issue we will discuss is gender. That is, does gender make a difference? Are male and female transformational leaders essentially the same, other than gender? Are women as effective—or, perhaps, more effective—as transformational leaders than men? We have some interesting evidence that addresses these ...