Psychological literature seemingly provides contradictory answers to the question of whether women and men are equally effective as leaders. There are generally two approaches used to answer this question: assign males and females the role of leader, keeping certain extraneous factors constant, and then compare leader or group effectiveness; or examine the leader's or group's reactions to actual male and female leaders. These approaches characterize the two sets of conflicting research results, i.e., research supporting gender differences in leadership behavior uses samples from the general population of women, while studies finding no gender-related differences uses samples from the population of actual female leaders. An alternative approach for examining leadership effectiveness in terms of gender differences is to assess how leadership role, leadership style, and situational characteristics influence leadership behavior. (Author/HLM)