The ‘drowning’ truth about female board members: The role of decision-making styles in public organisations

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2021-06-28

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en

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Although scholars have studied a lot about the different perspectives of women and men, less is known about how these perspectives influence their decision-making behaviour. We theorize how individual perspectives can have an impact on the use of procedural rationality and politics in decision-making and how these two different ways of decision-making can subsequently have consequences for the way board members execute their monitoring tasks in public organisations. Analysis of data from Dutch water authorities in the period of 2009-2014 shows that a female board member uses a procedural rational decision-making style in the boardroom. Further, we show that the adoption of a procedural rational decision-making style positively impacts the execution of board monitoring tasks. By finding these two effects, this study has found a full mediation of procedural rationality in the relationship between a female board member and the execution of board monitoring tasks, which we define by a new theoretical concept called ‘board member monitoring’. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this study. Also, we discuss the limitations of this study as well as suggestions for future research.

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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen

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