The Department of Strategy and Management invite you to a faculty seminar with Professor Jacob Lynsie together with Adjunct Professor Nicolai Foss, NHH.
BIO:
Jacob Lyngsie is Professor (MSO) at the Strategic Organization Design unit, University of Southern Denmark. His research lies at the intersection of strategy, human capital, and organizational economics, with a strong emphasis on applied econometrics. He works on entrepreneurship, innovation, organizational design, and gender, examining how firms discover and exploit opportunities and how they organize for innovation. His work has appeared in the Strategic Management Journal, Research Policy, Strategic Organization, and Long Range Planning. He holds a PhD from Copenhagen Business School, an LLM from La Trobe University, and an MSc in Business Administration and Commercial Law from CBS.
Link to Personal website: Jacob Lyngsie - University of Southern Denmark
Abstract:
Firms are under pressure to promote women into top leadership positions, often based on the assumption that such representation broadly benefits employees. However, research offers conflicting predictions regarding the cross-level consequences of women’s leadership, with some studies suggesting positive trickle-down effects and others pointing to queen bee dynamics. We address this tension by developing a framework in which both patterns arise as alternative responses to variation in leader identity threat, shaped by the gender composition of the board. Using matched data on 602 Danish firms from 2014 to 2020, we examine how the association between having a woman CEO and women employees’ outcomes varies with board gender composition. We find that when boards include women, having a woman CEO is associated with more favorable outcomes for women employees, including a smaller gender wage gap, greater representation in higher-level positions, and higher retention. In contrast, when boards are composed entirely of men, these associations are less favorable or negative. We further show that these patterns vary with observable proxies for CEOs’ role identity structure. Overall, our findings reconceptualize trickle-down and queen bee effects as context-dependent manifestations of a common underlying mechanism and advance understanding of when women’s leadership is associated with improved outcomes across organizational hierarchies.