Brief review of the article: Hillman, Amy J., Shropshire, Christine, Cannella Jr., Albert A.2007.Organizational predictors Of Women on corporate boards .Academy of Management Journal,50(4):941-952

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Organizational predictors of women on corporate boards"(Hillman et al., 2007)

This recent article is one of the first attempts to explain: What organizational characteristics predict females in the boardroom?

Recognizing these characteristics might help to understand, why do some firms have women on their board of directors and others don't? Later case exists although "popular press and institutional investors do pressure for greater female directors on board" (p.941) and "observable diversity (e.g. gender) on board is positively associated with improved financial performance" (Erhardt et al 2003).

Earlier studies examined gender at work group level& resource dependence scholars focus on how directors, far from gender, satisfy the needs of an organization. The authors considered early work, i.e. didn't start from scratch, by "combining resource dependence with work group level diversity theories to detect potential benefits of female board representation then linking these benefits with organizational characteristics, hence, deriving organizational predictors of gender diversity in the boardroom" (p.942)

and achieving their research objective.

Boards of directors "form a link between an organization &external environment" (p.942), and give linkage benefits to organizations like "advice and counsel, legitimacy, channels of communications and access to resources" (peffer & salancik, 1978). "Board's capital (human and relational) is the source of these benefits" (Hillman & Dalziel, 2003).Female representations on boards add value to these benefits. e.g., for advice &counsel by "creativity ..." (Hillman et al., 2007), for legitimacy by "respond to stakeholders' pressure for gender diversity..." (ibid: 944).Given these knowledge helped the authors to conduct a deductive research strategy, that gave them more time for analysis, whereby they set resource dependence theory, which suggests three benefits accrue to firms through boards, and outline four hypotheses, regarding the value added from female representation on these benefits, in which they detailed that female representation on board is positively...