Opportunity in disguise? Examining career paths of female directors following glass cliff assignments

Type
conference paper
Date Issued
2024
Author(s)
;
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Abstract
The glass cliff phenomenon, which denotes the greater tendency of women than men to be placed on precarious leadership positions, has attracted considerable scholarly interest since the notion’s inception two decades ago. By framing women-held upper echelon roles in crisis-stricken firms as “cliff”, the glass cliff research hitherto has concentrated on uncovering the downsides – i.e., biases and detrimental career implications embodied in such positions. This paper breaks away from the tradition to explore the potential upsides of glass cliff assignments. Based on a large-scale matched sample of Chinese listed firms over the 2012-2022 period, our analyses reveal that neither is a crisis-stricken firm more likely to engage in preferential selection of women in leadership positions, nor does such a position cause significant damages to a woman leader’s future advancement in the director labor market, manifested as courtesy stigma and/or declined employability. On the contrary, we proffer evidence that a precarious upper echelon position tends to accelerate one’s ascension to the acme of the corporate power pyramid, namely a CEO or board chair role, a tendency which applies to both men and women and robust in different crisis configurations. In addition, our analyses disentangle the crisis effect from the gender effect in glass cliff assignments. That is, the ex-post career implications of a glass cliff appointment are rather derived from the character and competences signaled by one’s leadership experience in crisis rather than the gender of the leader. With these findings, this study contributes to bringing more comprehensive and nuanced understandings of the glass cliff phenomenon and adds to the research on the career progression of female leaders.
Language
English
Keywords
Glass cliff
crisis leadership
female leadership
director labor market
contextualization
Event Title
Academy of International Business Conference
Event Location
Seoul, South Korea
Event Date
July 2-6, 2024
URL
Contact Email Address
xiaoxu.zhang@unisg.ch