Phyllis Duncan

Drawing upon theexisting literature, this study investigated the significance of Diversity as apredictor of leadership effectiveness, as it relates to the MultidimensionalMeasure of Leader-Member Exchange (LMX-MDM). A study of 300 working adults found that therewas a significant positive relationship between Diversity and the four LMXdimensions of Contribution, Loyalty, Affect, and Professional Respect. Collectivism and religious affiliation wereboth strong predictors with regard to Contribution. With regard to the dimension of Loyalty;collectivism, gender egalitarianism, and age helped to increase ratings of thesupervisor and perceptions of leadership. Affect only had one significant predictor, collectivism.The LMX dimension of ProfessionalRespect was found to have four significant predictors, including collectivism, religiousaffiliation, age, and years as a manager. Further regression analysis indicated that theDiversity dimension, Collectivism, was the driving factor of the relationship. This outcome indicated that Collectivism was astrong predictor of how positively participants rated their attitudes towardtheir immediate supervisor and perceptions of leadership. The results of this study indicate that diversity,particularly with regard to collectivism, is a positive predictor of leadershipeffectiveness using the LMX model. Furthermore,it strengthens the argument that organizations must be prepared to re-evaluatetheir policies with regard to diversity in the organization, particularly withrespect to Collectivism.

Increasingly, human resource managers are recognizing the need to understand how the differences between men and women affect organizational culture and leadership. This study of 314 workers examines the influence of gender on the leadership and cultural dimensions identified in the acclaimed Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) research program. The results show that gender is a significant predictor in two of the nine cultural dimensions—gender egalitarianism and assertiveness—and two of the six leadership dimensions—participative leadership and self‐protective leadership. These findings can help HR managers capitalize on the strengths of both male and female employees as they design policies and practices to achieve organizational objectives.

This research was designed to test the theoretical relationship among personality, implicit leadership, and transformational leadership in a setting devoid of face‐to‐face communication, which we entitled virtual communication. Specifically, the study was designed to link, by using the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), traits from the 5‐factor model of personality (the Big 5) to followers' perception of the leadership style of a virtual leader on the basis of Bass and Avolio's MLQ‐5X (1994). A voluntary sample consisted of undergraduate and graduate students from two universities in the south Texas area (N = 306). Respondents to the virtual communication rated Leader 1's communication, which used previously identified transformational language (Salter, Carmody‐Bubb, Duncan, & Green, 2007), as significantly more transformational than Leader 2's communication, using words not associated with transformational leaders. Participants who scored high in the Big 5 personality traits of agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and extraversion rated the leader as more transformational while those high in neuroticism rated the leader as less transformational.