Examining Political Will, Political Skill and their Maturation among Male and Female Managers

This thesis explores engagement in organizational politics among managers. There is increasing recognition that organizational politics are ubiquitous in organizational life and critically important in managerial roles. Drawing on micro perspectives in extant literature on organizational politics, this research attempts to better understand managerial engagement in politics by focusing not only on managers’ ability to engage in politics, but also on their willingness to do so. As such, the research examines what managerial political will and political skill entail, as well as how political will and skill develop. In doing so, special consideration is paid to gender, an aspect largely ignored in extant research on organizational politics. Adopting a qualitative exploratory approach, the empirical study consisted of semi-structured interviews with 38 managers (20 women and 18 men) in two global companies. The thesis makes four key theoretical contributions. First, it conceptualizes and identifies three dimensions political will, a previously neglected factor pertaining to managerial political engagement. Second, the study reconciles and refines the dimensionality of political skill, as related to existing models in field. Third, the thesis introduces a novel developmental perspective on political will and skill, proposing an initial model of political maturation. This model outlines three stages of political maturation by mapping out developmental patterns in managers’ political will and skill. The model also identifies triggers of political maturation. Finally, the thesis unpacks the role of gender in managers’ political will, skill and their maturation, demonstrating the importance of making gender visible and voiced when investigating managers’ engagement in organizational politics. In articulating these contributions, the study thoroughly accounts for the impact of organizational context on the political will, skill and maturation journey of male and female managers

The Female FTSE Board Report 2009: Norway and Spain join our census to benchmark corporate boards

2009 marks our eleventh annual report with a small incremental increase in the percentage of women on boards. Overall, there are 12.2% women directors on the FTSE 100 boards. There is a discouraging decline in the number of companies with female executive directors to 15 (from 16). Also disappointing is a decline in the number of boards with multiple women directors to 37 (from 39). In addition there is a decline in the overall number of companies with women on boards, and once again one in four companies have exclusively male boards

Increasing diversity on public and private sector boards - Part 2 What is being done to improve diversity on boards and how effective is this?

The project was commissioned by the Government Equalities Office in order to examine the issue of diversity on boards of directors in the private and public sectors.The project addresses two main questions: Why are there so few women and other under-represented groups on public and private sector boards? and What is being done in order to increase diversity on boards? The report is published in two parts: Part I considered the available evidence on diversity on boards. It examined academic and non-academic literature in the field, in the UK and internationally, and reviewed available evidence concerning the factors accounting for the absence of diversity on boards.This second part maps out current practices aimed at increasing board diversity. It is based on interviews with several international experts in the field, giving case studies of various initiatives in four country contexts (UK, Norway, Spain and the Netherlands). In drawing together the report’s conclusion, some recommendations are formulated for further action to increase board diversity in the

Increasing diversity on public and private sector boards, Part 1 - How diverse are boards and why?

The Government Equalities Office (GEO) commissioned Cranfield School of Management to examine the issue of diversity on boards of directors in the private and public sectors.The project sought to addresses two main questions: Why are there so few women and other under-represented groups on public and private sector boards? and What is being done in order to increase diversity on boards? The report is published in two parts: Part I considers the available evidence on diversity on boards. It examines academic and non-academic literature in the field, in the UK and internationally, and reviews available evidence concerning the factors accounting for the absence of diversity on boards. Part II maps out current practices aimed at increasing board diversity based.The review of evidence reviewed revealed a persistent under-representation of groups such as women, ethnic minorities and disabled people on both public and private sector boards. However, most evidence in the UK and internationally focused on gender rather than other underrepresented groups

The Female FTSE Board Report 2010: Opening up the Appointment Process

2010 saw another year of barely perceptible change in the representation of women in leadership positions of UK PLC’s top 100 companies. The incremental increases include three additional women on FTSE 100 boards taking the total to 116; one additional female executive director (ED); four more companies with women on their boards; and two more companies with more than one woman on the board, returning to 2008 levels. Overall, the percentage of women on FTSE 100 boards is 12.5%, showing a three year plateau. The number of companies with no female directors has decreased to 21 and the number of companies with more than one woman on the board has returned to the 2008 figure of 39. Only 13% of new appointments went to women.Barclays, Opportunity Now, Government Equalities Office, BoardE

Резонанс. 2016. № 27

This inductive study extends scholarship on gender, feedback and leadership by drawing on a large naturalistic data set of 1057 narrative developmental feedback comments to 146 political leaders in the UK. We used automated topic modeling, a novel methodology, to identify 12 underlying topics within developmental feedback, and complemented this with an in-depth qualitative analyses of feedback content for male and female political leaders across the topics. This resulted in four aggregate theoretical dimensions: 1) strategic focus 2) political influence 3) confidence and 4) agency and communion. Our findings chart novel dimensions of gender bias that go beyond the widely theorized tension posed by agency [male] and communion [female]. These new dimensions are pertinent to developmental, rather than performance feedback processes, and provide male and female leaders with different developmental roadmaps. We outline the value of our novel methodology to leadership scholarship and discuss implications for future research and practice

The female FTSE board report 2020: taking targets seriously

This year we see a positive picture in terms of the number of women on corporate boards. The percentage of women on FTSE 100 boards is 34.5% and the equivalent figure for FTSE 250 boards is 31.9%, so hopefully all FTSE 350 boards should hit the Hampton-Alexander target of 33% by the end of 2020. In total 324 women hold 355 FTSE 100 directorships. The percentage of female non-executive directors (NEDs) is at an all-time high of 40.8%, whilst the percentage of female executive directorships has risen slightly this year to 13.2%. There has been more progress recorded on the FTSE 250 boards, where the percentage of female NEDs is 37.6% and the percentage of female executive directors (EDs) is 11.3%. There is quite a lot of variance across boards indicating that only 63% FTSE 100 and 53% FTSE 250 have reached the target of 33% women in their boards