Management Accounting Section Midyear Meeting

Inclusive Managers

• In Event: Gender Diversity

Abstract

Many organizations acknowledge that inclusiveness, or the practice of directly engaging colleagues in activities, is becoming increasingly important as businesses become more complex. However, inclusive managers remain significantly understudied in large-sample archival research, largely because inclusiveness is difficult to measure. We overcome this barrier and develop a measure of managers’ inclusiveness by observing the interactions among corporate managers during conference calls, the only circumstance where interactions among managers can be observed for a large sample of firms. We examine inclusive managers’ characteristics, individual career outcomes, leadership team outcomes and firm outcomes. We find that inclusive managers are more likely to be female and older. They are more likely to be promoted to CEO, and a more inclusive management team is more likely to retain all managers. In addition, firms where inclusive managers are promoted to CEO experience more positive stock market reactions to the promotion announcements.

Authors

• Wei Cai, Columbia University Business School

• Ethan Rouen, Harvard University Business School

• Yuan Zou, Harvard University Business School