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Women Leadership
Abstract
The correlations study examined from an educational paradigm have women reached a new height in leadership. The heightened need for corporate women leaders to find new operating modalities, and strategies to enhance corporate prosperity in a world characterized by growing global competition, outsourcing, corporate downsizing, rapid innovation, and regulations.
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Purpose
This paper aims to investigate the phenomenon of the glass cliff, whereby women are more likely than men to be placed in precarious leadership positions. Men's and women's reactions to this subtle form of gender discrimination are examined, the identity processes involved, and the implications for organisations who must manage this change in the gender make‐up of their workforce.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is qualitative analysis of participants’ spontaneous explanations for the glass cliff, after having read about the phenomenon on an online news web site.
Findings
The research demonstrates clear differences in men's and women's reactions to the glass cliff. While women were more likely to acknowledge the existence of the glass cliff and recognise its danger, unfairness, and prevalence for women, men were more likely to question the validity of research into the glass cliff, downplaying the dangers. These patterns were mirrored in the explanations that individuals generated. While women were most likely to explain the glass cliff in terms of pernicious processes such as a lack of alternative opportunities, sexism, or men's ingroup favouritism, men were most likely to favour largely benign interpretations, such as women's suitability for difficult leadership tasks, the need for strategic decision‐making, or company factors unrelated to gender.
Originality/value
This research examines people's reactions to a new form of subtle sexism in the workplace which allows one to develop a more thorough theoretical understanding of the phenomenon and of the likely impact of practical interventions designed to help eliminate discriminatory appointment practices.
Two decades ago, people began using the "glass ceiling" catchphrase to describe organizations' failure to promote women into top leadership roles. Eagly and Carli, of Northwestern University and Wellesley College, argue in this article (based on a forthcoming book from Harvard Business School Press) that the metaphor has outlived its usefulness. In fact, it leads managers to overlook interventions that would attack the problem at its roots, wherever it occurs. A labyrinth is a more fitting image to help organizations understand and address the obstacles to women's progress. Rather than depicting just one absolute barrier at the penultimate stage of a distinguished career, a labyrinth conveys the complexity and variety of challenges that can appear along the way. Passage through a labyrinth requires persistence, awareness of one's progress, and a careful analysis of the puzzles that lie ahead. Routes to the center exist but are full of twists and turns, both expected and unexpected. Vestiges of prejudice against women, issues of leadership style and authenticity, and family responsibilities are just a few of the challenges. For instance, married mothers now devote even more time to primary child care per week than they did in earlier generations (12.9 hours of close interaction versus 10.6), despite the fact that fathers, too, put in a lot more hours than they used to (6.5 versus 2.6). Pressures for intensive parenting and the increasing demands of most high-level careers have left women with very little time to socialize with colleagues and build professional networks--that is, to accumulate the social capital that is essential to managers who want to move up. The remedies proposed--such as changing the long-hours culture, using open-recruitment tools, and preparing women for line management with appropriately demanding assignments--are wide ranging, but together they have a chance of achieving leadership equity in our time.
The changing workplace dynamics in India as across the rest of the world, with more and more women joining the workforce, requires an examination into the effect of gender differences on leader-member relationships. Consequently, the hypothesis that subordinate ingratiation and subordinate gender will interact to influence Leader Member Exchange Quality (LMX), such that ingratiation will have a stronger positive impact on LMX relationships for female subordinates than those for male subordinates was tested with a sample of employees working in a large organisation in eastern India. As hypothesised, subordinate ingratiation and subordinate gender interacted to influence LMX quality, such that ingratiation had a stronger positive impact on LMX relationships for female subordinates than those for male subordinates. The results provided support for the typical cultural orientation in India, and the Ambivalence Response Amplification theory.
Based on a survey of EMBA students in China and South Korea, this article examines how two sensitive but potentially salient criteria—race and gender—affect the selection of an executive to head the (a) foreign operations of a U.S. multinational in China and South Korea and (b) newly acquired U.S. operations of a Korean multinational. The results reveal a fairly complex picture of how gender, race, and the interplay of these two factors might affect these decisions. In the Korean sample, competencies mattered more than race and gender in a senior executive appointment to the U.S. operations of Korean multinationals. Also in the Korean sample, race and gender outweighed competencies in assignments to Korea. In the Chinese sample, competencies outweighed race and gender in a senior executive appointment in China. Overall, Koreans had a more positive attitude toward foreign-born Koreans than the Chinese toward foreign-born Chinese for senior executive appointments. Implications for international human resource management and diversity management, both theoretical and applied, are discussed. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Today, women represent more than 50% of the world's population, yet in no country do they represent nearly half of the corporate managers. According to the United Nation's fourth Conference on Women, women hold only 14% of the top managerial positions in business and only 10% of national legislative seats. Barriers to women's entry into senior management, otherwise known as the "glass ceiling", exist across the globe, and in some areas of the world it is worse than in others. Despite recent progress in most countries, women's advancement in the business arena has been slow. As we are into the 21st century, companies will need to increasingly reflect diversity in their workforce and management can no longer afford to ignore the positive impact women can make.
Female leadership is not simply the subject of a management consulting report supporting the worthwhile notion that women have a right to be located in leadership positions. This research develops a conceptual model linking the conditions and factors associated with female leadership in Thailand. It proposes a theoretical basis made on three levels:-Firstly, the macro-level: involving policy, economic, social and technological issues. Secondly, the meso-level: at industry levels, focusing on gender-based organisational practice in all sectors. Thirdly, the micro-level: at the level of the individual, concerning female leaders’ characteristics such as their personalities and competencies. The purpose of this article is also to critically evaluate the relationship among different theories and show how they relate to this study and what variables are involved.
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