Are Women Leaders Better for Modern Organizations?
By Ray Williams via Financial Post
Jan 7, 2013
The issue of the glass ceiling has been with us for sometime now, yet relatively little progress is being made in North America, when it comes to senior executive positions and boards of directors, compared with other countries. At the same time, there is increasing evidence women are more suited to the style of leadership needed in organizations today.
What is the evidence to support this contention? Here’s a sample of what I’ve come across.
Kellie A. McElhaney and Sanaz Mobasseri of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkley, produced a report, “Women Create a Sustainable Future.” Among their conclusions was “companies that explicitly place value on gender diversity perform better in general, and perform better than their peers on the multiple dimensions of corporate sustainability.” That was also, what a 2012 Dow Jones study found. It reported that startups are more likely to succeed if they have women on their executive team.
That maybe because women tend to have the attributes many see as leading to success. When global management consulting firm McKinsey asked business executives around the world what they believe were the most important leadership attributes today, the top four results were intellectual stimulation, inspiration, participatory decision-making and setting expectations/rewards — all attributes more commonly found in women leaders. McKinsey reported in its Organizational Health Index (OHI) companies with three or more women in top positions scored higher than their peers.
More recently Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, authors of The Inspiring Leader: Unlocking the Secrets of How Extraordinary Leaders Activate, writing in the Harvard Business Review Blog Network, argue that in today’s complex demanding world of organizations, women may possess superior leadership capabilities to men.They make that contention based on 30 years of research on what constitutes overall leadership effectiveness culled from 360 degree evaluations of a leader’s peers, bosses and direct reports and a 2011 survey of more than 7,000 leaders from some of the most successful and progressive companies. Read full article>>