Gender diversity may be the answer to performance
In Chapter 1, we argue that gender diversity may be the answer to improving organizational performance. We further argue that gender diversity on corporation’s boards (especially in health care organizations) has a direct link to performance.
Breaking the gender barrier of all-male boards continues to be a topic of interest in the media and government. With so many women in management advancing their educational qualifications, research across industries and countries show a low representation of women in top decision-making roles. Although an obvious lack of women corporate directors in Canada is prevalent, 50 percent of the workforce consists of women making decisions on the frontline.
Industry studies on upper echelons are primarily related to high-tech, computer, banking, electronics, semiconductor, furniture, finance, food, and airline industries. However, many studies limit their initial sample to a specific industry situation such as the type of investments involved.
We develop an awareness of the prevalence of male boards in Ontario hospitals and its consequence. Furthermore, we strive to provide information that could create new management processes, thus improving organizational survival of the Ontario health care sector.
Our findings are not unique to country or industry because underrepresentation of women in the upper echelons of many organizations is affecting global economies. The intellectual segregation is preferential tendency toward men accessing leadership roles.
We provide evidence that improved organizational performance in hospitals located in Ontario, Canada, is the consequence of gender diversity on boards.
Use of this information could benefit top management future appointments to the upper echelons in health care. However, the debate on the lack of female representation on health care boards has attracted more journal articles since Hambrick and Mason’s Upper Echelons Theory (UET) research in 1984. To date, more than 140 publications and 37 articles on female board appointments have followed since this first publication.
In addition, this information might benefit human resources in forecasting the hiring of board members, improving succession planning, and ensuring talented management.
The government could use the predictive model generated from data analysis of organizational performance to forecast allocation of resources in Ontario hospitals.
However, research specific to diversity, gender, and hospitals is limited, which makes this book the first to illustrate the link between gender diversity of boards and organizational performance in hospitals.
The benefit to the health care system is to bring purposefully gender diversity to hospital boards in Ontario. Further, organizational survival in a changing health care environment could be affected by engaging a dialog in response to the negligible change in hospital performance during the period of 2007 to 2011.
In the health care sector accountability, hospital performance is subject to a range of factors like service, quality, and efficiency of delivery. With the regulatory standardization of patient care practices, the stability in hospital performance does not imply only efficiency in the provision of services. Management researchers have viewed successful upper echelons or top management teams (TMTs) as multidisciplinary, heterogeneous, and diverse.
For consistency, upper echelons explored in this book are at the board level. The board is identified as the strategic decision-making team comprised of the upper echelons in organizations. Nonvoting members of the board are included as board members if identified on hospital board listings as contributors to the strategic decision-making process. The diversity of opinion, knowledge, and background allows a thorough discussion of performance potential, which helps minimize groupthink, reduce individual influence of team members, restrict the generation gap, and encourage assessment of alternatives.
Members of the Canadian government are considering legislating corporate boards by requiring them to appoint more female members, similar to the practice now in place in several European countries.
In 2014, the gender diversity of 126 acute care hospital boards in Ontario, Canada, comprised 60 percent males. Some hospital boards had all-male members or had at least three female members, but no board was comprised of all-female members.
In the health care industry, the cost of provisioning quality patient care continues to increase. A distinctive niche exists in health care for unified leadership because of the industry’s size, complexity, differing incentives, and scarcity of resources. Administrative inefficiencies persist in the health care industry. As it relates to hospital board composition and organizational performance, a connection exists with the diversity of the board in decision making to the efficient management of hospital expenses. Managing hospital costs in a time of change, reduced funding, and rising health care costs demands a new model of corporate governance and board composition.
The main sources of data we used are from the Canadian Institute of Health Information (CIHI), and Canadian hospital websites. The sources are reliable secondary sources, therefore reducing biases by not attempting to combine primary and secondary data.
Further, organizational performance is determined by efficiency as a quality measure of health care, indicating hospital effectiveness in maximizing the best outcome using fewer resources.
The efficiency indicator for finance and human resources is the Administrative Services as a Percentage of Total Expense (ASEPTE).
We used the variable gender to identify group heterogeneity of hospital boards grouped by the Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) and the efficiency indicator ASEPTE to show regional organizational performance.