A review of Hoobler, J. M., Masterson, C. R., Nkomo, S. M., & Michel, E. J. (2018). The business case for women leaders: Meta-analysis, research critique, and path forward. Journal of Management, 44(6), 2473-2499.
From a sociological perspective, the authors review the long-time topic in management of the “business case” for women’s leadership, which focuses on the relationship between women’s representation in leadership positions and organizational financial performance. It provides findings from meta-analysis as well as proposes alternative paradigms for future research. In this essay, I briefly document the research line, then introduce the alternative variables identified by the authors, and finally offer personal comments.
I. History of the “Business Case”
Starting from 1980s, the research line sheds light on managing diversity (e.g., women) in organization setting. Then, it connects the aforementioned diversity with efficiency and competitive advantage of firms. Eventually, it becomes an empirical case for HRM-performance inquiry, for which the authors identify 73 articles. Yet, as the authors posit, most of these researches adopt similar constructs and simple methodology.
Moreover, they “most often test direct associations between measures of the degree to which firms have women leaders and those firms’ financial performance.” Such a paradigm, according to the authors, limits not only the understanding of gender (rather than sex) as dependent variable and value conceptualization (other than financial performance) as independent variable, but also fails in identifying moderator / mediator necessary for a holistic view. The authors take the advantage of three exemplary articles to offer an account of possible alternative paradigms of management-sociology for future research. In the coming paragraphs, I will introduce the variables of alternative paradigms before commenting them.
II. Gender instead of sex as the IV
In management language, gender is a demographic variable identical to sex, while in sociology language, gender is a socially constructed concept. Acknowledging this discrepancy, the authors offer an account by Kantola (2018) to demonstrate how socially contracted concept matters more than just sex in understanding organization settings.
III. Non-financial values as the DV
While traditional management scholarship measures financial performance as DV, the authors borrow from Huffman et al. (2010) a sociological construct: gender segregation throughout an organization, as a DV alternative. In other words, the value of women leadership is gender integration, instead of “diversity pays (Herring, 2009).”
IV. Moderator and Mediator
Using women’s subjective experiences of tokenism documented by King et al. (2010) the authors identify an opportunity to explore moderating / mediating factors from a context.
V. Comments
Out of the three exemplary articles, the approach of King et al. (2010) interests me the most because it delves toward an ethnographic perspective which offers higher construct validity. Yet, it can be time-consuming and may offer little external validity. In brief, even with novelty, I’m doubtful about the practicality of the advices from the authors.