Summary
Women in developed economies have succeeded in harnessing opportunities at the top hierarchy levels in organizations, and this has been facilitated by their persistence to access quality education and compete with their male counterparts. As more women take over chief executive officer (CEO) positions and other positions that give them the power to influence financial decisions in organizations, debates have sprouted, with a focus on the performance of the associated organizations. Investors’ behavior is influenced by factors such as the characteristics of the members of the leadership function in an organization, and various studies have revealed that some investors consider gender as a determinant of efficiency in decision-making among leaders.
Jeong and Harrison (1219) conducted a study aimed at establishing whether having women at the CEO level in organizations has a negative implication on the performance of the organization. The study also aimed at revealing the attitudes of investors when injecting capital in a company with a female CEO. The researchers reviewed 146 studies focusing on the performance of organizations headed by female executives. The studies had been conducted in 33 states across the world, which made the study applicable across the world. The researchers focused on performance reports in the studies to compare the productivity of female CEOs and identify the sentiments of various investors, concerning the gender of the leaders in the organizations.
The findings of the study revealed that companies with female CEOs have a relatively higher performance level on a long-term basis. This is because investors have the perception that females are not likely to take high risks with the organizational capital; hence, they expect the associated organizations to only engage in investments that guarantee positive returns. However, the study also revealed that the performance of such organizations declines on a short-term basis because investors have a negative attitude toward female leaders. Most investors take their time to evaluate the decisions being executed by a female CEO before injecting their capital into the associated organizations, which translates to low productivity on a short-term basis after a female CEO takes over.
Critique
One of the major strengths of the study is that the researchers utilized secondary data from different scholarly studies collected through a stratified approach to enhance the reliability of their findings. The reliance on secondary sources may have led to the propagation of bias from the respective studies, and this implies that if the researchers in the selected 146 studies had introduced various types of bias in their analysis, this study is also subject to the same errors (Jeong and Harrrison 1221). It is noteworthy that the researchers did not conduct any validity tests on the qualitative and quantitative data collected through the secondary sources.
Additionally, the lack of any primary data to facilitate dual-comparison and validate the findings requires the researchers and other scholars to look into replicating the findings for substantiation. The sample space associated with the secondary material was also too small to produce reliable outcomes; hence, future studies should look into utilizing a more significant number of studies with varying theoretical frameworks covering the subject in question (Jansson and Nordgaard 11). However, the researchers in this study provided remarkable authorship of the report because it not only contains qualitative data but also a vast amount of quantitative data in tables derived from the secondary material, which gives the readers a platform to conduct individual analysis that can be compared with the researchers’ conclusions.
Works Cited
Jansson, Lennart, and Julie Nordgaard. “Validity and Reliability.” The Psychiatric Interview for Differential Diagnosis. Springer International Publishing, 2016, pp. 9-16.
Jeong, Seung-Hwan, and David A. Harrison. “Glass Breaking, Strategy Making, and Value Creating: Meta-Analytic Outcomes of Women as CEOs and TMT Members.” Academy of Management Journal, vol. 60, no. 4, 2017, pp. 1219-1252.