女性政治领袖当选对企业任用女性领导的影响研究——来自缅甸的证据

Female Political Leader Election and Its Influence onFemale Managerial Leadership in Myanmar

组织研究中对性别不平等的讨论常常围绕女性高管为企业带来的优势展开,但却少有探讨女性如何能够在制度性的不平等下获得晋升。事实上,政治领域中女性领导力的制度化是提升企业管理领域中女性领导任用的重要影响因素。本文以2015年昂山素季领导的全国民主联盟赢得大选前后作为背景,根据制度理论提出了女性政治领袖赢得选举能够显著提升企业领导任用中的性别平等程度。本文运用双重差分模型,验证了女性政治领袖赢得选举能够推动企业中女性领导任用的制度化,从而增加女性晋升高管的机会。这一效应在制度欠发达的地区更为显著。本文为女性政治领袖当选提升企业领导任用中的性别平等程度提供了直接证据;填补了关于性别平等改善的影响因素研究的空白,同时回应了近期有关重大事件影响作用的呼吁;除此之外,本文还考虑到了制度变迁的地区异质性。

Purpose:While organization studies have criticized the gender inequality issues by highlighting the benefits of having female top managers,the organization literature remains largely silent about how those female top managers broke the glass ceiling at the very beginning.Paradoxically,previous studies advocate that female managerial leadership is actually conducive to organizational performance without explicating the antecedents of those rare appointments under their assumed general institutionalized inequality.This study aims to investigate whether the exposure of gender roles in political spheres triggers the rise of gender equality in managerial leadership.Design/methodology/approach:Myanmar is a perfect research context,a typical emerging economy of serious gender inequality issues and frequent regime changes.Though under political turmoil recently,the winning of the National League for Democracy(NLD)led by Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar in the year 2015 just provides a valuable experimental context that may fill the gaps,where females are being oppressed for a long time.Despite criticized under the Rohingya’s crisis,the legendary lady Aung San Suu Kyi has won high appraisals in the past and successfully led the NLD to take the majority of seats on the General Election in the year 2015,which presents as the most salient challenges to the long-term military governance.However,neither legislations nor demographic trends,which two factors are believed as the key influencers of gender equality in employment,have changed significantly in Myanmar within this historical transition.To probe the contention,we have adopted the panel survey pertaining to The Enterprise Survey in Myanmar initiated by the World Bank in the year 2014 and 2016.Specifically,this study has constructed a quasi-experiment design with the modeling of difference-in-difference.462 firm-year observations from 231 firms have entered into the final dataset.Findings:We invoked the(de)institutionalization logic and investigated whether organizational changes start from the election of female political leader even in the absence of any regulatory changes.Though limited to two primary hypotheses,we deem that the examination depicts a crucial exposure-based and top-down institutionalization mechanism of improvements in gender equality in managerial leadership in emerging economies.That is,the female exposure in the political sphere triggers organizational changes in gender equality.The contextualization in Myanmar serves as a representative sample to verify whether the election of a female political leader can enhance the cognitive awareness of gender equality in managerial leadership among the business entities.The hypothesis is well justified that the winning of lady Aung San Suu Kyi and her party NLD has created prominently positive effects in improving women’s chances of being appointed as the top managers within the business sectors.This presents direct evidence that the election of female political leaders generates salient influences on organizational acceptance of gender equality in managerial leadership when accounting for other regulatory and economic factors.We have also identified that such conducive effects are more profound in institution-wise poorer regions.Though further empirical evidence needs to be found to consolidate the generalizability,our preliminary finding provides several theoretical and practical implications worth mentioning.Originality/value:Firstly,the study provides direct evidence to corroborate that new institutionalization starts from the change of political leaders.Given that Aung San Suu Kyi has limited political power,we have unveiled that a female leader’s political election per se can significantly change cognitive perceptions that help improve gender equality in managerial leadership,which highlights that strong controlling powers are not a necessary condition for an institutional change.Secondly and relatedly,the study contributes to unraveling the thorny interpretations of the relationship between political identification and improvements in gender equality.While women’s participation in the workforce,access to education,legislation that outlaw sex discrimination are critical,we further add that the institutional change emerging from the political sphere rather than the pre-existed institutional outputs can make a difference.Lastly,we also join with the recent literature by reminding of the consideration of subnational idiosyncrasy when examining organizational behaviors.Implications/research limitations/suggestions for future research:The first issue is about a single country and a single event context.Although we have highlighted the merits of the sampling context,the findings should be bounded by those historical and institutional conditions thus generalizability can be assured only if we found similar results across similar events that happened in other emerging economies.Secondly,the study cannot completely tease out the effects of electing a female leader from electing an institutional innovative(democratic)leader since Aung San Suu Kyi carries both identities.However,it is not a serious concern since most of the government-supported foundations,social enterprises,and media coverage have emphasized her female identity while reminding her limited power in the political sphere.Yet,it is certainly fruitful to find ways to separate the two potential effects apart.