Supervisors: Anders Ryom Villadsen & Jakob Arnoldi
Discussants: Yulia Muratova & Jakob Lauring

Title
CEO Gender and Organizational Outcomes in State-Owned Enterprises: The Role of Gender Diversity in Government Top Management Teams

Abstract
While prior research has documented mixed evidence regarding the organizational consequences of female leadership, we still know relatively little about the contexts in which female leaders are more or less effective. This study investigates whether the government leadership shapes the effects of female CEOs on organizational outcomes in state-owned enterprises (SOEs). We examine this question in the context of Chinese listed SOEs, whose executives pursue commercial objectives under state ownership while being highly reliant on local governments. We construct a matched panel dataset linking SOE CEOs with mayoral teams across 580 firms and 158 municipalities from 2010 to 2018. We found that government TMT gender diversity strengthens the effect of female CEOs on innovation but weakens their effect on financial performance. Specifically, the positive effect of female CEOs on innovation increases with government TMT gender diversity, whereas their positive effect on financial performance is evident only when government TMT gender diversity is minimal - that is, when government leadership teams are nearly all male. These findings show that the organizational effects of female CEOs in SOEs are outcome-specific and contingent on the gender composition of the external leadership context in which they operate. The study contributes to upper echelons research by suggesting CEO effectiveness as a cross-boundary and relational phenomenon. It shows that the gender composition of an external government leadership team conditions the role of female CEOs’ leadership.

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