The Impact of Team Size on the Leadership Style and Psychological Capital of Women Leaders

In recent decades, there has been a rise in women in leadership roles. The group environment may influence their leadership styles and their personal resources to deal with daily challenges. In this study, we focus on studying the different group sizes led by women to examine if the size of the group has any impact on the levels of women’s leadership style (transformational, transactional, or laissez-faire) and psychological capital. This will give us a closer look at the type of work setting women express their leadership style best. We collected data from 155 women in leadership positions using a panel with Qualtrics across different job sectors in the US. Results showed that most of the women were transformational leaders, which previous research has shown to be the best leadership style. However, one-way ANOVA results showed no differences in the transformational (p=.063) or Laissez-faire (p=.464) leadership styles of women leading different team sizes (small, medium, and large). However, women who lead small groups showed significantly lower transactional leadership style compared to women who led larger groups. No significant differences were found when examining each of the components of psychological capital (p=.278). These results highlight that women in leadership positions use more transformational leadership behaviors and do not differ in personal resources regardless of their group size. Our findings bring us one step closer to understanding the work settings where effective leadership styles can be shown