Abstract
The significance of contemporary managers’ leadership competencies is steadily growing. After over thirty years of economic and social transition, Kazakhstani managers’ leadership skills and styles remain a fragmentarily examined topic by local and international scholars. Despite the first leadership competencies models appearing 50 years ago, researchers still actively debate their pros and cons and strive to design the frameworks for managers’ and companies’ prosperity. This article explores Kazakhstani women and men managers’ competencies in flowpromoting leadership initially proposed by M. Csikszentmihalyi. The quantitative research method was grounded on a comprehensive competencies assessment through the involvement of local managers in a virtual business simulation (N=508; 51% women, 49% men). The findings demonstrated that Kazakhstani women and men almost equally practiced flow-promoting leadership: among 29 competencies, gender specificity has been detected only in 8. In compliance with the research results, women were slightly better in communication, delegating, giving feedback, stakeholder management, and strategic thinking. In contrast, men were assessed somewhat higher for active listening, prioritizing, and time management. The theoretical significance of the present study is two-fold: first, it implies the initial massive investigation on leadership and gender in Kazakhstan; second, the findings contribute to the existing flow-promoting leadership concept with the new gender-related knowledge. The practical contribution of the gained results lies in the opportunity for managers to analyze and ameliorate their potential of leading people and processes in organizations.