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Project

Conflict dynamics in the boardroom: the role of women in family and non-family business.

This project aims to better understand the role of women in the board of organizations. With this, we focus on the top management team, or the ‘executive board’. Recently, substantial literature has emerged on the importance of diversity, and particularly gender diversity, in top management teams,showing that a more diverse board contributes to higher quality decision making, and ultimately to better performance of the organization. Less clear is what the underlying mechanisms are, and what moderating variables might play a role. In this project we investigate two factors. Firstly, we focus on the way conflicts are managed in top teams, and particularly the role women have in this respect. Secondly, we compare family with non-family businesses. Given that world-wide most companies are family-owned, and family-managed, it is surprising how limited the amount of research is, comparing family and non-family business, when it comes to conflict and board dynamics. Most family business are started up by men, and managed by men. However, their (female) spouses or other family members often also are involved in management, and they usually are partly owner of the company. This means, that they have an important voice when it comes to key decisions in the organization. Our central research question is, what the role of women is in decision making, particularly when conflicts arise within the board, or in the relation between owners and management of the organization. We investigate this through the following studies a) Setting the scene. In this introduction we describe and analyze the different positions woman can have within the board of companies, depending on key variables such as ownership, governance, family- non-family business, size, and formal position. b) Literature study. Here we investigate and bring together three lines of literature; gender and leadership; conflict in top teams, governance of family business c) Based on the literature study, we aim to conduct three empirical studies a. Qualitative study 1, interviewing women in family business b. Qualitative study 2, interviewing male ceo’s of family business about the role women play in their boards. c. Multiple case study, investigating 6-8 top teams, observing and interviewing members The dissertation will have the form of introduction chapter, and four academic papers, based on the studies described, and a concluding discussion chapter.

Date:1 Jan 2018 →  19 Jun 2023
Keywords:conflict, conflict dynamics, female role, family business
Disciplines:Applied psychology, Sociology of organisations and occupations
Project type:PhD project