Commercial Strength Of Chinese Female Executives

"Women without talent is virtue" is increasingly becoming an old saying.

With the vigorous development of China's economy, female entrepreneurs and business managers have quietly risen, and have become a fresh force in the business world.

Should the business community dominated by men be open to women?

Can women's participation increase value for enterprises?

Can gender uniqueness become an advantage?

Women's power to support half the sky

Yes

In view of the above problems, the management circles began to think whether women entrepreneurs and senior managers can and to what extent do they add value to enterprises?

Is the added value sustainable?

What channels should enterprises maintain to bring the value of female executives participation?

These problems are important because effective discovery and cultivation of managerial talents is a key means to enhance the competitive advantage of enterprises.

If women entrepreneurs and senior managers can really increase their sustainable value for enterprises with unique gender advantages, enterprises should design an effective senior management appointment system, and consciously encourage and accommodate female members to participate in the top management team.

Research focus: women as top management personnel

We can examine women's commercial strength from different levels: (1) as entrepreneurs, they are the founders or owners of enterprises, commonly known as "female proprietor"; second, as members of the board of directors of enterprises, they join in the highest control group of enterprises in different but equally distinguished status; (3) as top management women, including CEO (1 persons) and non CEO (a number of people).

For entrepreneurs, gender differences may not be used to judge the success of enterprises.

Therefore, from the perspective of enlightenment to enterprises, it is more practical to reveal the essence of phenomena from the following two levels.

Top management members may overlap with board members, while directors of non business members of boards of directors often have far distance from their daily operations. Therefore, we focus on women who are senior managers.

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Commercial reasons for reusing women: gender differences theory and resource dependence theory

In the US Standard & Poor's 1500 enterprises in 2006, the proportion of at least one woman in the top management team was less than 1/3, while the proportion of women in many enterprises was less than 6%.

In contrast, China's private listed companies generally absorbed women's participation in top management teams (92.6% of our sample), while female executives accounted for 16.7% of the total number of team members.

That is to say, for the vast majority of private listed companies, 1~2 female executives have been used.

This should be a notable feature of the top management team of China's private enterprises.

In view of the universality of female executives, we focused on the relationship between women's participation and corporate value. The results showed that the higher the degree of women's participation in these private enterprises, the higher the value of Tobin's Q value.

That is to say, women's participation contributes to the improvement of corporate performance.

What are the reasons? We can get answers from gender difference theory and resource dependence theory.

As a level of diversification, gender differences in team membership can also have positive and negative effects on team effectiveness, and top management teams are no exception.

The theory of gender difference emphasizes the gender characteristics of men and women, and their respective advantages and attitudes reflected in their attitudes and behaviors.

For example, male masculinity, decision-making courage, help to deal with the crisis; feminine feminine, careful thinking, help to resolve conflicts.

Therefore, the gender composition of a team should first focus on the consistency of goals and values among members, followed by complementarities of their respective characteristics, seek common ground while reserving differences, and jointly play the effectiveness of teams.

From this theoretical perspective, the gender differences brought about by women's participation are conducive to giving play to their respective advantages in gender thinking and handling problems, thus improving the decision-making ability and governance level of top management team.

From another angle,

First of all, the inclusion of female members in top management teams can help enterprises improve their external image.

The existence of female executive members makes enterprises more in line with the universal expectations of fairness and representativeness, thus enabling enterprises to get support from external environment.

Second, female executives can help companies more effectively fight for consumers' support and loyalty to their employees.

An American survey shows that 88% of purchasing decisions are made by women.

Female executives can better understand the psychology and behavior of female consumers, thus helping enterprises to formulate correct business strategies for this particular consumer group.

From the point of view of employees, the participation of female managers in top management teams conveys positive signals to female employees, which makes them feel that there will be better development and promotion space in enterprises, thereby reducing the cost of employees' turnover.

Thirdly, female managers have less bureaucracy and more interactive management style in management. These characteristics are conducive to team building, staff motivation and team creativity.

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What do women executives accomplish in their careers? Talent, not relationship.

What characteristics will help female executives better play the role of promoting enterprise performance?

As mentioned before, women have different natural qualities from men.

However, many natural qualities are often not directly observed and must be understood through actual management behavior.

What we want to know more is how observable features will help women play a better role, and the two dimensions of human capital (education measurement) and social capital (past career experience and current social part-time measurement) are potential supporting factors.

Human capital reflects people's cognitive ability, information gathering and processing ability, analytical ability and problem solving ability.

As an enterprise executive, the level of human capital directly affects his or her decision-making ability and corporate governance ability, thus enhancing the performance of enterprises.

Correspondingly, the role of social capital is more complicated.

Social capital is a social structure resource owned by individuals (individuals or personified organizations or enterprises), which exists in the social relations of members of society and can be used by this social member to help them take some action and achieve some purpose.

From the perspective of TMT, the introduction of higher social capital should obviously play a positive role.

Similarly, from the perspective of private enterprises, the types, complexity and special situations of their social capital will affect the role of these social capital in the performance of enterprises.

Through the analysis of 567 private enterprises we investigated, we found that more than half of the female executives had received higher education, indicating that these female executives had relatively high level of human capital, and the high educational background of female executives played a positive role in their corporate governance.

The analysis shows that female executives with high human capital level generally bring higher market value.

Compared with the high level human capital of female executives, they have relatively non universality of social capital, that is, most female managers who serve private enterprises do not have the outstanding experience of serving in state-owned enterprises or government departments.

However, although most female executives of private enterprises do not have the same social capital as ordinary people, the importance of social capital remains.

However, compared with the role of human capital, the role of social capital is weaker.

Therefore, we can sum up: (1) in our private enterprises, women executives have made their own contributions through their own intelligence rather than special relations, and have made contributions to enterprises. Second, although the unique social resources are not necessary for the success of female executives, some unique social resources are still conducive to the better role of female executives and thereby enhancing corporate performance.

Female executives with social capital can further enhance corporate performance.

Our findings form an interesting contrast with the results of research conducted by foreign counterparts in the United States: Although China's economic and cultural status and women's social status are quite different from those of the United States, women's position in the top management team of private enterprises is more common, but the impact on corporate performance is very consistent.

This comparison deserves our attention, guiding us to think about how to give full play to women's commercial strength and create more business value and social wealth in China's economic environment.

We hope that the research results can enlighten the private enterprises in China's emerging economy.

First of all, according to the findings, private enterprises should fully recognize the importance of selecting and appointing female executives.

Through this means, enterprises can get competitive advantages that no female executives participate in the enterprise. Second, in the new business environment, female executives should receive systematic education besides business awareness and management experience.

Higher educational level can significantly improve their performance as decision-makers and top managers. Third, in the current market environment of China, the market economy system is still affected by many social relations, so establishing an orderly and effective social resource system is very necessary for enterprises.

The proportion of female executives who are relatively rich in social resources is relatively low in the private listed companies that we are investigating. One possible reason is that this unique human resource has not accumulated in our private enterprises, but has gone to the competitors - state-owned enterprises and foreign-funded enterprises.

Is it true that private enterprises are not aware of these unique human resources?

The means are not sharp enough?

All these need to be further investigated and verified, but obviously, our private enterprises should pay close attention to this problem. If we can effectively increase female executives with high social capital, the competitiveness of private enterprises should be further improved.

Therefore, how to create an environment to attract these female executives to join has become an important issue facing private enterprises.