Empathy

Crisis Anatomy and Leader Preference

Any crisis seen as a direct threat to an organization's existence could either come from the external environment as in the case of interorganizational conflicts (e.g., hostile takeover between companies) or the internal environment as in the case of intraorganizational turbulence (e.g., mistrust between unions and management within a company). Given these crisis types, a question that bears to mind is which crises are more susceptible to women's glass cliff appointments. One possibility is to try and understand how the process of natural selection helped create sex differences in the emergence of leadership during conflicts within and between groups. In one study, Van Vugt and Spisak subjected teams to engage in a public-goods game under conditions of either intragroup conflict or intergroup competition. They posited that intergroup competition would support the selection of a male leader, whereas intragroup conflict would favor that of a female leader. Their rationale was that each sex evolved unique adaptations to deal with problems in its respective role and that these adaptations would, in turn, elicit specific sex-biased leader prototypes in followers. Given that humans traditionally existed in collective groups with a rigid division of labor, the behavioral strategies that men and women employed benefited each sex differentially. Whereas men hunted and fought in wars, women foraged and invested greater resources for the birth and the upbringing of their children.

This reasoning led Van Vugt and Spisak to develop the male warrior hypothesis which holds that men evolved psychological mechanisms to facilitate coalition formation against rival outgroup members. By comparison, it remained vital for women to invest resources in sustaining social networks to support themselves and their children. Thus, women are thought to have a greater interest than men in maintaining their group's integrity and this may explain their motivation to keep intragroup peace. Conversely, men coalesce to dominate other groups because resources accrued from an intergroup victory elevate their status. In hunter-gatherer societies like the Ache of Paraguay and the Hadza of Tanzania, food acquisition extends beyond its functional significance and serves as a conspicuous signal to prospective mates. This drive for dominance is proffered to explain why men might be more willing and able than women to assume leadership roles during intergroup conflicts, and why they might be preferentially selected in crises of this sort. Although humans today live differently than hunter-gatherers, competition remains a focal activity that can affect the fate of any social structure. By the same token, contemporary organizations resemble tribes of the past; both are social arenas where individuals compete with one another for the survival and welfare of their ingroup members. If one chooses to accept this notion, then one may expect the sexes to be elected in leader roles according to the type of crisis experienced.

Recent studies have looked more closely at the nature of organizational crisis and its effect on leader selection. In the first, Ryan et al. demonstrated that women are chosen to lead when the crisis requires managing people, bearing the brunt of failure, or enduring until the crisis subsides. Men, on the other hand, are chosen when the organization requires a spokesperson or when the goal is to reverse downward trends. Building on these findings, Rink et al. showed that participants evaluate risky leadership positions as a function of available resources. During a crisis, women appease people's concerns, ride out the downturn, and may even act as sacrificial lambs and, as such, appear to be more interested in the communal aspects of leadership by focusing on social resources. Comparatively, men tend to be more involved in activities that improve company performance. Thus, they may favor financial resources over social ones when leading in a crisis. Studies have found evidence linking assertive traits that are associated with male leaders and communal traits associated with female leaders to think manager-think male and think crisis-think female heuristics, respectively. In line with this logic and consistent with the finding that women prefer to manage people during a crisis than to concentrate on performance, we propose that women will be favored as leaders in an intraorganizational crisis while men will be selected as leaders in an interorganizational one, given equal qualifications on other attributes such as experience, competence, and reputation. We also believe that people's ingrained perceptions of - and both personal and vicarious experiences with - empathic females and less empathic males play a key role in these leader choices. This prediction is congruent with the evolutionary-based female peacekeeper hypothesis which explains that individuals having feminine markings are more likely to emerge as leaders when efforts are needed to restore peace within a group. Interorganizational crises can at times develop into intraorganizational ones, such as in the case of a price war between competing firms that leads to restructuring and layoffs. In such cases, we believe that a firm's board of directors will determine who is best to lead the company according to the type of crisis they expect represents the most imminent danger.

Another important attribute that characterizes a crisis and that can impact women's glass cliffs is crisis intensity or severity. Crisis intensity remains to be explored in glass cliff research and, as such, an assumption exists that women will be chosen to lead a crisis-laden firm irrespective of the crisis's magnitude. Such a prospect requires a conceptual leap because of neglected context. To address crisis intensity, we used the term "glass cliff" to locate and peruse 64 studies published between 2005 and 2015. In the majority of experiments, crisis level was either unacknowledged or presented as minimal to moderate. For example, crisis was qualified variously as a "steadily decreasing performance in the past 5 years", a "steady drop in financial performance," or a "steady drop in appeal" with only one study describing the crisis as a "tremendous downward trend". Simply put, glass cliff researchers have not considered a threat so ominous that would risk jeopardizing the organization's existence. In hostile environments, the roles that followers expect their leaders to assume are predictable, and include being less supportive and consultative and more assertive, directive, and decisive all of which suggest a stereotypically masculine autocrat.

Our predictions that female leaders will be selected over male leaders during intraorganizational crises, and male leaders over female ones during interorganizational crises, should hold whenever crisis intensity is unlikely to threaten firm survival. Several findings offer insight as to why empathy, a trait we have touted as being relevant for leaders during intraorganizational crises, will be less appealing when crisis intensity is extreme. First, while leader empathy is sought by followers who require comfort, understanding, and emotional support until the crisis begins to abate, the same trait is not likely to inspire those experiencing a calamity. Second, when the firm's concern is focused on turning performance around from the brink of economic collapse, research has shown that stereotypically masculine traits in leaders (e.g., dominance) seem to be desirable over feminine traits (e.g., warmth). In essence, what we are saying is that the relationship between an organizational crisis and women's glass cliff appointments will be moderated by the type and intensity of the crisis, such that the relationship will be the strongest during intraorganizational crises of low-to-moderate intensity.

To recapitulate, a potential cause underpinning glass cliff appointments lies in the human tendency to seek the more empathic sex in distressful situations. Given that women were historically precluded from ascending to leadership positions in industrialized societies, the idea that they confronted glass cliffs remained dormant until now. It is only when women became contenders for CEO positions that recruiters' perceptual biases became triggered and produced what we now see as glass cliffs. A possibility remains that across temporal and sociocultural contexts, individuals sought comfort in primary caregivers most of whom were women and who possessed empathic qualities needed to manage distress. Why would there not be a similar mechanism operating in an organizational context, one that would call for choosing a female leader? It remains questionable whether this would be the case when a company is performing adequately. In this context, followers might shift their attention away from their leader's communal traits and focus instead on agentic ones.

We have resorted to using evolutionary psychology as a theoretical framework to generate predictions about glass cliffs. Although some scholars praise its impact and popularity, the same scholars have criticized it for portraying humans as passive recipients of selection rather than active shapers of their cultural environments. According to these critics, viewing evolution as a process through which the mind was influenced by environmental pressures says little about humans' effort and ability to construct their niches as they see fit. Human behavioral ecology and cultural evolution are other Darwinian subfields each one treating culture in its unique way and adding to our understanding of glass cliffs. Although researchers typically focus on the distinctions between these subfields, some have argued that complementarity between them exists and should be pursued. We discuss each of these subfields next to see how they could inform our rationale.