A woman’s touch
Want a more creative, innovative, and productive company? promote equality and Employ more senior women to the boardroom, a new study suggests
Want a more creative, innovative, and productive company? promote equality and Employ more senior women to the boardroom, a new study suggests
What can you do to encourage innovation in a business? That’s a question that managers, academics and expensive consultants have been trying to answer for years. Governments would quite like the solution too. As developed nations lose more jobs to low-cost countries, the fashionable way of maintaining growth is to encourage greater creativity – but how?
New research from Norway suggests that the answer might be refreshingly simple: employ more women at senior levels.
When companies appoint more women to their senior management boards, those organisations change in ways that promote innovation, according to a study from BI Norwegian School of Management. Women encourage their peers to think about a wider range of opinions when making decisions, the study found.
Their presence also led to boards being better prepared for their work, more involved in their responsibilities and more productive.
Researchers used a set of questions to gauge how disposed a business was to innovation and analysed the answers in relation to how many women the business employed. “The results show there is a significant and positive correlation between the percentage of women and the degree of organisational innovation in the enterprise,” says Professor Morten Huse, a leader of the project.
A greater number of well-prepared, enthusiastic women on the board had a positive effect on other board members, who had to raise their game to show they were equally on the ball. “This creates a positive cycle where preparations and involvement in board meetings increase in general,” says Huse. “Men’s behaviour appears to change considerably when women join the board.”
Companies around the world have been recruiting more women to senior positions in recent years. But Norway is among a handful of nations to force change through positive action. In 2006 the country passed laws requiring companies to include more women in the boardroom.
Other countries are passing disclosure rules that require companies to say what they are doing to get more women into senior roles. The idea is inspired by the need for equality and to encourage companies to dip into a wider pool of talent. But the Norwegian study suggests there is a strong business case for such moves too: women can bring that much needed dash of creative flair.
