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As a feminist management theorist and geek, study conclusions like this always frustrate me. Obviously, the study sheds little light on the actual cause of the correlation, but my guess based on my personal experiences with leadership strategy is this: The choice to hire diversely is symptomatic of certain types of thinking:
1) Open / wide / flexible thinking. Someone who hires diversely is more likely to find it easier to conceptualize worldviews farther from their own as still relevant.
2) Civic responsiblity / empathy. A desire to be a part of the solution to gender imbalance rather than a part of the imbalance.
3) Long term thinking. Having people who are more different from you on the team is a more effective solution in the long run, because you're likely to cover more bases. This means that leaders who make the choice to hire diversely are more likely to also be leaders who plan slightly further ahead, are more dextrous in the different ways they could see problems, and able to focus on non-top-down perspectives on the business, such as what the customer might be thinking. (All of this is correlative of course, not a->b.) As a result, leaders who hire diversely are more likely to be already be leaders who are better at running a successful company. Ie, diversity is a litmus, not a direct cause. I would be very, very surprised to find if, someday when women run 50% of companies and are in workforce balance, companies with women executives are still more likely to be successful. EDIT: I do, however, think there is also an edge to leadership that can sometimes come simply from being in a minority, whatever the minority is. Not because there's anything wrong with white men, but simply because there's a unique perspective on problems and indirect causality that you get from being at a cultural disadvantage that, if you manage not to get weighed down by it, ends up being pretty useful in business. |