Abstract
In recently years, female executives all over the world have attracted the widespread concern of many scholars, and the relationship between female executives' participation in top executive teams and firm performance is found to be considerably complicated. This paper tries to clarify this relationship by adopting a multi-approach perspective. It finds that resource dependency theory, catfish effect theory and stakeholder theory regard female executives as the facilitators of improving firm performance; feminism theory and vase theory indicate that female executives would contribute less than their male peers; upper echelon theory demonstrates a contingent effect instead of a fixed effect as considering female executives' effect on firm performance; assimilation theory argues that effect of female executives on firm performance has no difference with that of male executives; principal-agent theory, social capital theory and human capital theory all simultaneously hold contradictory views of positive effect and negative effect of female executives on firm performance; and social cognition theory argues that female executives' effect on firm performance is positive or null.
Highlights
Fifteen year into the 21st century, gender equality appears to be at the forefront of the global humanitarian agenda [1]
Since the female executives' effect on firm performance has not been clarified to a good degree, it is an important theoretical issue to review, explain and further balance the different conclusions on the role of female executives in determining firm performance
The potential causal paths of the relationship between female executives and firm performance respectively are built on the basis of at least eleven competing theoretical perspectives, which include principal-agent theory, human capital theory, feminism theory, resource dependency theory, social capital theory, catfish effect theory, stakeholder theory, assimilation theory, vase theory, social cognition theory and upper echelon theory
Summary
Fifteen year into the 21st century, gender equality appears to be at the forefront of the global humanitarian agenda [1]. Though the consequences of female presence on boards of directors and executive teams were widely studied in human sciences and management sciences literature, in our knowledge, there is still no exhaustive manuscript treating so many different theoretical perspectives. In this regard, this paper adds a valuable contribution to the field of gender diversity research, and the output of this research is interesting for future research in the field and explains the different results existing in the gender diversity literature
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