Exploring Women Directors’ Influence on the Decision Making of Corporate Boards in the Biotechnology Industry

• In Event: Women Leaders in Context: Women Business Leaders and Female Executives on Corporate Boards

Short Description

The presenters will share a literature review, research plan, and results available at presentation time for an interpretative phenomenological study of women directors’ perceptions of women’s influence on the decision making of U.S. boards of directors in the biotechnology industry.

Detailed Abstract

The literature is rich with research exploring publicly available statistical information related to women’s representation on corporate boards of directors. The studies include analysis of gender statistics on board membership, women’s representation on specific board committees, and the correlation between women’s board membership and organizational profitability. However, few studies have gone within the “black box” of corporate boards to explore the functioning of those boards and the value women contribute once they have been included in board membership. Terjesen, Sealy, and Singh (2009) published the most thorough review of current literature related to women and boards found during the review of literature related to this study. In the article, they observed “As extant literature is predominantly based on publically available information, truly innovative research would tap into the female directors’ experiences” (p. 332). This study, in addition to work begun in Norway by Huse (2008), begins to answer this need.
This study, the first in a program of research intended to develop grounded theory related to women’s role in board decision making, will explore the influence women board members have in board decision making in the biotechnology industry in the US from the perspective of women currently serving on those boards. The study should help the researchers answer the question: What are the lived experiences of women board members in the biotechnology industry regarding women’s influence in decision making on corporate boards? The biotechnology industry has been selected for this initial study because it is growing at almost twice the rate of the United States’ private sector and has experienced problems with its business model, customer relations, and strategic alliances (Nugent & Kulkami, 2013) so is perceived to be an industry that should be seeking to use the best advice available from its board members.
This first study will be an interpretative phenomenological study, a double hermeneutic circle (Smith & Osborne, 2003) of women board members seeking to make sense of their decision-making experiences and the experienced practitioner/scholar researchers seeking to make sense of the board members’ making sense of those experiences. The intent is to use the women’s own voices to gain a rich, deep understanding of the experiences and interpretations of a small number of board members.
A number of management scholars have conceptualized boards as a specific type of team or work group (Bainbridge, 2002; Bettenhausen, 1991; Erakovic & Overall, 2010; Forbes & Milliken, 1999; Vandewaerde, Voordeckers, Lambrechts, & Bammens, 2001). This suggests that the substantial body of literature on groups in an organizational setting can inform the understanding of how a board actually functions and how individual members experience board service.
Early empirical work on diversity and work group performance looked at direct relationships between group demography and performance, often with seemingly conflicting results. The common business case for women on boards has been that women provide unique and important information to the board and thus improve decision making (Simpson, Carter, & D'Souza (2010) or that gender diversity may create important external linkages or increased legitimacy in the external environment (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978/2003; Simpson, et al., 2010). However, other researchers have found that diversity in a work group can have either positive or negative effects (Martin-Alcazar, Romero-Fernandez, & Sanchez-Gardey (2012). Martin-Alcazar et al. (2012) and Milliken and Martins (1996) termed diversity a “double-edged sword.”
Researchers using a group dynamics lens to explain the effects of gender diversity on work group performance have applied social categorization and similarity/attraction theory (Homan, Hollenbeck, Humphrey, Van Knippenberg, Ilgen, & Van Kleef, 2008; Stahl, Maznevski, Voigt, & Jonsen, 2010), critical mass theory (Joecks, Pull, & Vetter, 2013), social identity theory (Elsass & Grave, 1997; Mathisen, Ogaard, & Marnburg, 2013), and tokenism (Torchia, Calabrò, & Huse, 2011) to suggest that women on boards may develop low role expectations or experience negative stereotyping, which will shape both their behaviors and individual outcomes within the group.
Taken together the theoretical and empirical work suggests that boards of directors, viewed as a type of team or workgroup, are complex social systems and there remains much work to be done to understand how they function. There is little work which explicitly examines gender diversity on corporate boards beyond the input-output model of diversity and performance. Theory suggests room for additional empirical work at both the individual and the group level to increase our understanding of how boards and individual directors’ experience gender diversity and the complex relationships between gender diversity, group dynamics, processes and performance.
The results from the study should give us a first glimpse of the extent to which existing theories help explain how having women on boards of directors affects board decision making. Having a deep understanding of women’s experiences with decision making on boards should provide insight regarding the relative applicability of the potentially relevant existing theories and help researchers, including the researchers on this team, plan future research studies.
The insight should also be valuable both to the practitioners responsible for leading corporate boards and the advocates for increasing the number of women on boards as it is expected to further the understanding of the positive roles women are playing in board decision making and the obstacles to their influence they are experiencing, whether those obstacles be personal, organizational, or societal.

Participants

• Lynne E. Devnew, University of Phoenix

• Monigo Saygbay-Hallie, University of Phoenix

• Anne L Benning, Independent Researcher