The Queen Bee Effect: Female Managers Are Good for Innovation, Less So for Female Employees

When it comes to gender diversity in top-management teams, it may seem that the more, the merrier. However, new research by a Bocconi scholar and a colleague from Copenhagen Business School leads to a more fine-grained view. Upper-echelons research suggests that increasing diversity among top managers can promote the out-of-the box thinking that drives entrepreneurial and innovative activity. Additionally, as top managers influence the values of organization members, female managers can also support entrepreneurial behavior among lower-level employees, because their leadership styles (characterized by inclusiveness, communication, communal values and knowledge sharing) is conducive to the recognition and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities.

A large-scale survey of all Danish firms with more than 40 employees, conducted by Nicolai Foss (Rodolfo Debenedetti Chair in Entrepreneurship) and Copenhagen's Jacob Lyngsie (The More, the Merrier? Women in Top-Management Teams and Entrepreneurship in Established Firms, in Strategic Management Journal, 38: 487-505, 2017, doi: 10.1002/smj.2510) shows in fact that the relation is all but linear. The presence of women displays its positive effects on entrepreneurial outcomes only beyond a threshold level (meaning that having just one woman in the top-management team is has no effect). Interestingly, the positive effects are weakened in firms that have many women in the workforce.

Foss and Lyngsie trace these seeming anomalies back to social categorization, "a pervasive psychological force that assigns universal properties to all members of a given group". As stereotyping and intergroup biases in closed male top-management teams lead to the perception of women as less competent and having less decision-making influence, when one or a few women enter the team, the "contribution from female top managers may be sidelined or simply dismissed as inferior", the authors argue. When female managers become more common and a certain threshold is reached, however, they are recategorized not principally as female, but as top managers and can give their effective contribution. "Although female top managers still represent a minority, they no longer represent a new and unique challenge to the dominant group", Foss and Lyngsie suggest.

The recategorization of women as top managers, though, can have negative effects on lower-level female employees, as female managers' behavior often doesn't meet female employees' expectations of gender solidarity. Avoiding gender-based favoritism can be key to maintaining the new status, to the point that, in extreme cases, female top managers can be seen as "queen bees", particularly hostile and unfriendly, by the other women in the firm, with a consequent decline in the latter's motivation and commitment.

The authors also note that the average wage of women is lower in companies with a high number of female top managers, but their data doesn't allow to convincingly explain the correlation.