<p>Female leaders often face competing role expectations—those associated with their gender and those tied to their leadership roles. This tension is particularly salient in Chinese contexts, where a masculine-oriented culture reinforces traditional gender roles, making it more challenging for women to navigate leadership positions. To navigate these dual demands, they may engage in Paradoxical leader behaviors (PLB), which draw on Chinese Yin-Yang philosophy and integrate traits that align with both communal gender expectations and agentic leadership requirements. Drawing on role congruity theory and the paradox perspective, we investigate whether female leaders who exhibit PLB effectively promote both employees’ individual task performance and organizational citizenship behavior within teams by fostering employee identification with team, compared to their male counterparts. A field survey of 469 employees and an experiment involving 190 participants provide support for these assumptions. This study contributes to the literature on leadership and gender by illuminating Paradoxical leadership dynamics and offering new insights into the backlash framework in gender research</p>