EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The more, the merrier? Women in top‐management teams and entrepreneurship in established firms

Jacob Lyngsie and Nicolai J. Foss

Strategic Management Journal, 2017, vol. 38, issue 3, 487-505

Abstract: 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. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.2510

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:stratm:v:38:y:2017:i:3:p:487-505

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0143-2095

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Strategic Management Journal from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:bla:stratm:v:38:y:2017:i:3:p:487-505