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Faculty of Management Research Workshop; Shyam Kumar, Lally School of Management
Details
Gender and Cooperativeness: The Impact of Women Board Members on Strategic Alliances
Bill Francis, Shyam Kumar, Abena Owusu
We examine how gender diversity in the boardroom affects a firm’s strategic alliance activities. Experimental evidence suggests women exhibit a number of behavioral preferences that are consistent with cooperativeness, such as a distaste for competition, a tendency to contribute to the common good over the private good, and inequality aversion. Building on these microfoundations, the primary hypothesis we test is whether firms with female directors engage in a higher level of alliance activity compared to firms with all male directors. Using a panel data of alliances by U.S. firms between 1997 and 2014, we find support for this hypothesis. In addition, we find firms with female directors make less use of formal structures such as equity to govern their alliances, and that their alliances are more exploration oriented rather than exploitation oriented. Our results demonstrate that the cooperative attitudes of women manifest in important ways in the strategic choices made by firms with female board members. Another implication of our study is that the behavioral preferences of top management teams have a significant effect on the modes of expansion chosen by firms when extending their boundaries.
Please contact faculty administration should you wish to attend.
Where
Bayes Business School, 106 Bunhill Row
2005
106 Bunhill Row, London EC1Y 8TZ, UK
Speakers
Shyam Kumar
Professor Shyam Kumar is an Associate Professor and Lawrence Fellow of Professional Excellence at the Lally School of Management, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (www. rpi.edu). He currently serves as the academic director of the MBA program at Lally. Professor Kumar’s research examines how firms draw their boundaries, and manage their product and market scope through actions such as corporate diversification, alliances, and acquisitions. In addition, he also studies how strategy and financial markets interact to collectively shape decision making in the areas of innovation and entrepreneurship. Professor Kumar’s work has appeared in leading journals and book volumes, including Advances in Mergers and Acquisitions, Advances in Strategic Management, Business and Society, Computational and Mathematical Organizational Theory, Journal of Cultural Economics, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, and Managerial and Decision Economics amongst others.
Professor Kumar has won wide recognition for his teaching, and was voted as the Outstanding Professor by the Master’s graduating class at Rensselaer for three successive years. He has previously held the position of Zicklin fellow, and his dissertation research was sponsored by the prestigious Richard Irwin award. He currently serves as an editorial review board member at the Strategic Management Journal. Professor Kumar’s industry experience is in steel where he worked in the area of strategy and international business with Tata Steel, India’s blue chip corporate. He has also consulted with the New York Press Association on revitalizing the news industry in the age of digital disruption. Professor Kumar enjoys playing golf, listening to music, and working across disciplines to pursue research ideas.