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Institutional Conformance or Strategic Imperative: Should Nonprofit Boards Push Diversity?
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Author: Christopher A. Fredette, U. of Windsor
Author: Ruth Bernstein, U. of Washington, Tacoma
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Should boards of directors, and the organizations they serve, simply conform to expectations held in institutional norms or should they treat board diversity as a strategic imperative? This study explores a competing logics design that pits one explanation against the other, in which we test whether (1) diversity approached as acts of institutional conformance to stakeholder and constituent expectations in the regulatory, normative, and competitive landscape are tested against (2) diversity treated as a strategic imperative in which boards attend to internal sources of performance advantage, imperative to success and survival. We explore competing approaches to increasing leadership diversity among boards of directors, and whether these improve governance outcomes. Results suggest that engaging leadership diversity as a strategic imperative reaps performance benefits beyond those of comparable organizations that fail to do so. Achieving benefits begins with increasing visible minority representation in leadership positions, but depends on leading and governing inclusively.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Collaboration, Venus, and Mars: The Gender Factor in Inter-Sectoral Relations
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Author: Khaldoun AbouAssi, American U.
Author: Zachary Bauer, American U.
Author: Johnston Jocelyn, American U.
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Scholarship across disciplines offers evidence that gender plays a significant role in organizational dynamics. Gender differences in preferences, attitudes and behaviors affect employee behavior and organizational outcomes. This article extends the gender factor into the realm of inter-organizational and inter-sectoral collaboration to examine not just whether, but also how gender affects the management of these relationships. We analyze these differences in the context of local government-nonprofit organization (NPO) relations in a developing country with data from two 2017 nationally representative surveys of local governments and NPOs in Lebanon. Our results suggest that in male-dominated nations like Lebanon, females leading local governments organizations are less likely to enter into cross-sector collaborations than their male counterparts, and in the nonprofit sector, gender plays no significant role in the decision to collaborate. However, among existing collaborations, females, as compared to males, have been more likely to both initiate and fund the inter-organizational/inter-sectoral relationships. These results contribute to the literatures on gender, management, and inter-sectoral collaboration, and offer an agenda for future scholarship on these topics.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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Board Gender Composition and the United Way (WITHDRAWN)
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Author: Lauren Dula, Indiana U. Bloomington
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The U.S. nonprofit workforce is female dominated, yet its board composition and leadership still skew male. This paper argues that behind the institutionalism driving these decisions lie gender status beliefs based in Status Characteristic Theory. These beliefs influence our expectations of performance for men and women in leadership positions and set the “logics of appropriateness” for board selection. Using a panel dataset of approximately 350 United Ways, primarily from the Midwest and South, I use pooled OLS to analyze community characteristics that influence our expectations of women’s performance and may predict their presence of United Way boards of directors and in board chair positions. Findings indicate that the size of the business community, the population of a community, and historical trends in performance are all significantly and negatively related to the proportion of women on United Way boards. These, as well as rurality, impact the likelihood of having a female board chair. Expectations of women associated with these social characteristics are explored.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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The impact of organizational munificence on women’s careers in public service
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Author: Rachel Elizabeth Ashworth, Cardiff U.
Author: Sarah Krøtel, Aarhus U.
Author: Anders Ryom Villadsen, Aarhus U.
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Occupational segregation and precarity remain persistent problems for women in public organizations and are symbolized by ‘glass ceiling’ and ‘glass cliff’ effects. Theory indicates that organizational munificence at the time of appointment may impact on individual careers as a consequence of ‘imprint- environment fit’. Prosperous conditions at the time of hire might generate confidence and capability, whilst austerity may prompt risk-averse tendencies and resilience within female employees. However, these effects remain relatively unexplored in the context of public services, despite potential to furnish explanations for glass ceiling and glass cliff patterns. We evaluate the impact of organizational munificence at appointment on subsequent employment outcomes for women in Danish public services. Statistical analyses draw on the Integrated Database for Labor market research in Denmark, which provides an annual picture of the labor market situation (employer, salary, managerial status, and hours worked) for every individual, linked to gender, age, ethnicity and education. Results indicate that austerity at time of appointment is related to higher wages later in the career, and that effects of conditions at time of appointment are more important for women with less human capital. Implications for debates on diversity and resilience in public organizations are identified.
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Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
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