Women Political Leaders and TMT Gender Diversity:Sociopolitical Linkage&Organizational Conditions

Abstract

Existing studies have focused primarily on internal institutional processes that shape the gender diversity of top management teams (TMTs), but our knowledge is limited on how the internal processes respond to external institutional processes. We propose an externally focused explanation to argue that the presence of top women political leaders in regional governments can generate a sociopolitical effect that encourages the hiring and retention of women in TMTs. Moreover, TMTs with women representation below the network or industry average are more likely to respond to the sociopolitical influence to meet or beat the threshold of legitimacy established by interlocked firms or peer firms in the same industry. In addition, we examine organizational conditions (i.e., decline and board gender diversity) under which TMTs with women underrepresentation are more responsive to the sociopolitical and legitimacy threshold effects. Using panel data of listed firms in China, we obtained evidence that supports our pre...