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The COVID-19 crisis, along with the other associated complex crises, has amplified the gap that exists in terms of the number of women reaching leadership positions, despite the quality of their work and their important contributions in various fields. This paper aims to explore women's leadership qualities, and perceptions regarding leadership, based on quantitative data originating from four studies. Concerning the research methodology it includes qualitative research and a comparative analysis of global studies. The paper focuses on women, looking mostly for the proportion of women within organizations, and the main characteristics of women's leadership. The analysis then turns to Romania, where we have identified the proportion of women leaders. The main goal of the paper is to investigate the representation of women leaders in EU countries and in particular in Romania. The results of the study illustrate that favorable work conditions have a greater impact on women's aspirations to become leaders. Extrinsic structural inequalities, such as bias against women in certain professions, and gender, racial and other discrimination, are barriers to women's access and advancement in leadership positions in the workplace. Intrinsic individual characteristics of successful women leaders, namely conscientiousness, respect, confidence, acceptance, and resilience have facilitated their success in obtaining and maintaining leadership positions.

The main purpose of the paper is to highlight the increased recognition and growing importance of human-oriented leadership in a constantly changing world. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed many management shortcomings in developing current and future leaders. The difficulties creating new business models, adapting to new working environments, and fostering humane corporate cultures underscore the short- and long-term challenges. The literature review offers multiple perspectives on our humanity and its inherent challenges, measures of effective leadership, approaches to leadership development, and what seems to be emerging as a values-based, human-centered approach to what effective leadership looks like. The paper suggests a holistic interdisciplinary approach aiming to support partnership between the international business community and academic environment. The methods include: a literature review as background and context; a case study; a comparative analysis of best practices in four countries; and a statistical analysis of economic practices in Romania. The main results indicate: an increased acknowledgment of human-centered leadership practices as essential to effective leadership; the use of a 70-20-10 model of leadership development as a best practices approach; and the adverse effects of the pandemic on the Romanian economy. Our conclusions reaffirm: the power of the human-centered approach to how leaders have to perform; the need to rethink how leadership development should be done, and the ongoing challenge of choosing to invest in leadership as a sound business decision. Authors conclude that the changes in mindset, priorities, decisions, and practices will be challenging for leaders to make. Suggestions are offered about this new path.

The main goal of the paper is to illustrate, deeply reflect and highlight how the employees demands and their expectations had evolved through time and correspondingly how companies should address the anticipated challenges that might come along with these changes. Within the current turbulent and dynamic business environment managers need to be highly aware of their employee level of motivation in order to keep and possibly to increase their company’s competitiveness. From a methodological point of view, the paper uses an empirical analysis designed such as to better provide a set of relevant and valuable data, information and knowledge that would have to be used in order to anticipate the trend and expected dynamics of employees’ demand and their corresponding expectations. Enterprises should make efforts to anticipate these potential complex changes that are starting to materialize. These emerging challenges might bring diversification and amplified volatility of the main influencing factors that will determine companies to better identify and to find more efficient and effective ways to adapt their Human Resource strategies and policies in order to assure a sustainable increase of labour productivity that would highly and constantly contribute to obtain, keep and support their company competitiveness based on a long-run competitive advantage.

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