Transformational leadership style not only affects the job satisfaction and performance of employees, but impacts on their emotion and arousal that may result in the burnout and turnover of members (Challedurai, 1993; Maslach & Jackson, 1986). Previous research explored that female athletics administrators tended to demonstrate more transformational leadership than males, whereas both the female and male team leaders (coaches) were similar in expressing their burnout (Doherty, 1997, Kelly, 1994). However, do gender differences exist among YMCA program directors regarding their perceptions of transformational leadership manners? What are the female and male supervisors' expressions or experiences of burnout? Limited research effort has been given to identify detailed transformational leadership style and the degree of burnout for each individual who holds a recreational leadership position. Therefore, this paper was designed to examine whether there were gender differences of YMCA directors perceiving transformational leadership and which burnout factor was differently responded by the female and male supervisors. The voluntary participants were 275 randomly selected YMCA male and female program directors from two (northeast and southeast) regions of America. The Multi-factor Leadership Questionnaire-Form 5X Short (MLQF-5X) (Bass & Avolio, 1995) including nine factors, and Maslach Burnout Inventory-Human Service Survey (MBI-HSS) (Maslach & Jackson, 1986) containing three domains, were applied to test gender differences of the directors perceiving transformational leadership and burnout. The merged data from two regions was analyzed using SPSS. Separated ANOVAs were utilized to determine mean differences for participants on each factor of two instruments. ANOVA revealed a significant (F=4.178, p < .05) mean difference on 'Idealized Influence (behavior)' (IIB) between two gender groups. Females rated IIB higher than their male colleagues. A significant (F=5.302, p < .05) mean difference was also found on 'Depersonalization' variable for the directors. Males responded higher than females on the depersonalization of burnout. Compared to previous findings, this investigation indicated that in recreational organizations, the female leaders prefer to apply more encouragement for followers' respect and faith to organizational missions than the male directors do. Advancing idealized influence to the members is a key for the program leaders to direct their subordinates and enhance effectiveness of the organization. Additionally, the researchers suggested that the upper-level decision makers should pay close attention to the male program supervisors who may experience more burnout than their female colleagues due to their psychological needs of personalization, characteristics of gender, and job nature of daily service. Keyword(s): leadership development