Research summary: We study the association between firms' entrepreneurial outcomes and their gender composition. Though highly topical, there is little solid empirical knowledge of this issue, which ...calls for an inductive approach. We match a paired-respondent questionnaire survey with population-wide employer-employee data, and find evidence that the presence of female top managers is positively related to entrepreneurial outcomes in established firms. Yet, this relation is conditional on the proportion between male and female top managers. Another finding is that the overall proportion of women in the firm's workforce negatively moderates the relation between female top managers and entrepreneurial outcomes. We discuss various mechanisms that can explain these findings, and argue that they are best understood in terms of the dynamics of social categorization. Managerial summary: We investigate how companies benefit from having more women on the top-management team. We show that beyond a threshold level of female top managers, more women are associated with more entrepreneurial outcomes (more products and services profitably launched). However, this positive effect is weakened in firms that have many women in the workforce. These effects may be explained in terms of the ways employees mentally categorize managers and how this influences their work motivation. We find evidence for such an explanation.
Research Question/Issue
We approach the ongoing debate in the literature on when and why a female leadership advantage exists in the context of China. In particular, we examine whether female CEOs ...outperform male CEOs in state‐owned enterprises (SOEs).
Research Findings/Insights
We show that a female leadership advantage exists in SOEs. We find that the female leadership increased performance is attributed to improved profitability, capital structure, and operating efficiency. The magnitude of this gender effect is bigger in central state‐owned enterprises (CSOEs) than that in local state‐owned enterprises (LSOEs). The results are robust to additional tests that mitigate the sample selection and other endogeneity concerns.
Theoretical/Academic Implications
We use the role congruity theory to motivate and develop the hypotheses drawing insights upon the literature in psychology and leadership. Female CEOs are perceived as less congruent with their leadership roles given the gender role stereotypes. Thus, they face more challenges and difficulties than male CEOs. These obstacles take at least two forms which are significant in SOEs: shareholder activism and sex discrimination. Female CEOs have to outperform their male counterparts to alleviate the pressure from shareholder activism and showcase their managerial skills and abilities.
Practitioner/Policy Implications
For the state shareholders, the extra scrutiny in selecting female CEOs should be lifted given this outperformance. The evidence is also relevant for CEOs to choose their career paths among different types of firms, for boards of directors on their strategic decisions on CEO hiring, and for policy makers to promote the female leadership advantage.
Growing evidence suggests the presence of a female leadership advantage (FLA), such that women leaders tend to be associated with more effective outcomes in uncertain conditions. However, mechanisms ...linking women's leadership to effective outcomes are less well understood. We integrate FLA insights with ethics of care philosophical framework to conceptualize how women leaders achieve effective outcomes in the context of the urban revitalization crisis in the United States. We propose and empirically test the mediating role of ethics of care leadership in the relationship between women mayors and economic health of their cities. We used data from the Urban Institute that includes 272 United States cities and measures of variables in our conceptual model at five points in time spanning 36 years (
n
= 1185 city-year observations). We capture ethics of care leadership focused on racial inclusion with an index measure of a city’s racial spatial segregation, homeownership gap, poverty gap, and education gap, and we capture economic health with an index measure of a city’s employment growth, unemployment rate, housing vacancy rate, and median family income. We found that female-led cities were associated with better economic health, and this association was mediated by female-led cities’ association with greater racial inclusion. Ethics of care leadership appears to be one pathway through which a FLA manifests itself in the context of the urban revitalization crisis. This underscores the importance of city leadership that balances social and economic prerogatives. Implications are discussed.
Purpose
– This paper takes an institutional approach to identify cognitive, normative, and regulatory factors affecting women’s business leadership in an under-studied traditional society. The ...purpose of this paper is to assess how such forces work to create a case of female leadership deficit (FLD) in Lebanon.
Design/methodology/approach
– The authors analyze interview data to identify themes linking women’s leadership with societal institutional forces. The qualitative analysis provides an understanding at the societal level of analysis which is only partially tempered through organizational structures.
Findings
– Misalignments among cognitive, normative, and regulative pillars inhibit real change. Organizational structures are not highly salient as the most important factors affecting women’s leadership. Rather, patriarchal structures, explicit favoring of males over females, and assignment of women to nurturing roles within the private sphere of the family are the major limiting factors impeding women’s ascension to leadership.
Research limitations/implications
– A promise of the institutional approach is enhancing the capacity to make meaningful comparisons between societies. This opens the door to uncovering whether documentable changes in regulations, cognitions, values, and norms regarding women in business leadership, will lead to observable changes in the size of FLD.
Originality/value
– This study presents a case of institutional pluralism where a positive force in one direction (regulatory) is sometimes opposed by other forces (cognitive and normative) limiting meaningful change. This study helps to explain why societies differ in the size of the FLD and to identify factors that predict within societal changes in the size of this deficit over time.
Emotional intelligence is a second-stratum factor of general intelligence (MacCann et al. 2014) that: (a) has been popularly touted as an essential individual difference for effective leadership ...(Goleman 1998), but also (b) exhibits large gender group differences favoring women (Joseph and Newman 2010). Combining these insights, we propose that emotional intelligence is a key mechanism in the so-called female leadership advantage (Eagly and Carli 2003-which emphasizes the finding that women are rated slightly higher in transformational leadership compared to men). The current study seeks to explain this gender leadership gap by specifying three personality-based theoretical mechanisms that enhance transformational leadership: (a) emotional intelligence (favoring women), (b) communion (stereotypical femininity; favoring women; Hsu et al. 2021), as well as an offsetting effect of (c) agency (stereotypical masculinity; favoring men). Meta-analytic data (including original meta-analyses among the leader's ability-based emotional intelligence, transformational leadership, communion, and agency) are used to test our theorized model. Results confirm the full mediation model of female leadership advantage. Because the three unique mechanisms operate in different directions, their individual indirect effects are notable, but their cumulative indirect effect is small and near-zero. In conclusion, we emphasize incorporating emotional intelligence with other personality-based explanations of gender effects in leadership perceptions.
The present study analyses the gender differences in implementing organizational change in Romania’s central public administration, from a subordinates’ perspective, in order to establish whether ...female leaders are more likely to adopt change in comparison to their male counterparts. The research methodology consists of an opinion survey conducted in the central public administration of Romania based on a questionnaire. The study reveals that female leaders are perceived in a positive, yet not in a better manner than men. They are considered transformational leaders capable of involvement in the process of organizational change of public institutions. There are no significant differences between the perceptions of men and women as leaders, although almost all the differences are in favour of men. The study shows a strong correlation between transformational leadership and leaders’ capacity of implementing the management of change, the relationship being stronger in the case of female leaders who should continue to strengthen transformational behaviours.
We investigated whether transformational leadership was associated with more positive perceptions of outcomes among intercollegiate athletic directors in the U.S. Also, we examined whether leader ...gender influenced perceptions of participants, and if there was an interaction between leadership style and leader gender in predicting organizational outcomes. Division I and II male participants (
n
= 99) evaluated either a male or female transactional or transformational leader on extra effort, satisfaction, and effectiveness. MANOVA and post hoc analyses were used in our evaluation. Findings indicated transformational leadership was related to more positive organizational outcomes, that there was no difference between male and female leaders on attaining these outcomes, and that there was no interaction between leadership style and leader gender.
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