AN UPWARD JOURNEY TO LEADERSHIP POSITIONS: From the perspective of Malaysian Women

With increasing education, changing cultural and social taboos, and emerging diversification of workforce in the past decade has resulted in the surge of Malaysian women in organizations and in leadership roles. Despite the various limitation, the number of women entering labor market and pursuing their professional career in different sectors is remarkable. The purpose of this study is to understand the journey of women to reach and retain in the leadership roles in corporate Malaysia. Therefore, the study analyzed the various enabling supportive factors that made it feasible, the difficulties or challenges faced during their career and the strategies adopted to overcome to be in the leadership positions. Qualitative research method with case study approach was used for this study. The empirical data were collected from a semi-structured interview with middle and senior level Malaysian women from a different professional background. The empirical findings revealed updating oneself, attending training, job learning and support from family/spouse as facilitators at a personal level. Whereas, learning and development oriented company’s culture, training opportunity, flexible policies for working mothers, financial aid for job-related certifications and courses were identified as organizational level supportive factors. Additionally, negative attitude of male peers/ clients, time management, discriminative behaviours from top executives, nepotism during promotions and receiving failing projects were identified as the challenges and barriers that constrained women advancement. Moreover, the study discovered the strategies such as seeking help from colleague and mentors, sharing workload issues with the immediate boss, nurturing core competencies, building strong networking, pursuing higher education and decision to remain single as the measures taken to overcome the challenges to reach and retain in the leadership positions.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format