The role of trust in leader and leader's gender on effect of leadershi̇p style on subordi̇nates' performance

As a result of increase in women participation to workforce, number of women in leader position is increasing. However, there is limited amount of research about issue in literature. Therefore, there is a need to explain that effects of male and female leaders' on subordinates' performance are different or not. Researchers claimed that managerial abilities of female leaders are better than their male counterparts. On the other hand, effect of leader's on subordinates depends on consistency between gender role expectation and leader's behaviors. It is expected from leaders who work in a male dominant environment, indicating masculine leadership behavior. However, because of gender role expectation, female leaders with masculine leadership style will influence their subordinates negatively. Thus, there need to clear understanding about effect of female leader in male dominant organizations like military. In literature there are limited number of studies examined leadership style-performance-trust in leader-leader's gender, but there is no study investigate the relationship between these variables on military work setting. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the moderating effect of leaders' gender on leadership style and performance. Moreover, trust in leaders will be examined as a potential mediator on leadership style and performance relationship. In this study, transformational and transactional leadership were our independent variables; task and contextual performance were independent variables. Morover trust in leader was mediator and leader's gender was moderator in the research model. We tested our hypothesis on 261 active duty Land Force personnel from Ankara. In the analysis, gender, age, tenure, organizational tenure, relationship tenure and leader gender were used as control variables. The validity and reliability analyses of the scales were conducted. We utilized, Pearson correlation and regression analyses to test the research hypotheses. Also, moderating role of the leader's gender and mediating role of trust in leader were tested. The study results indicated that transformational and leadership has effects on task and contextual performance. Moreover, these relationships were mediated by trust in leader. However transactional leadership has effect on only contextual performance. We found that their trust in leader has full mediating role on relationship between transformational leadership and task and contextual performance; partial mediating role on relationship between transactional leadership and contextual performance. Furthermore, it was found that leader's gender has the moderating effect on the relationship between transformational leadership-performance and trust in leader relationships. Moreover, we found that mediating effect of trust in leader on transformational leadership - performance relationship depends on leader's gender.