Empathy

Nearly 60 years ago, Bowlby postulated that children develop affective, cognitive, and behavioral schemas to ensure their proximity to primary caregivers or "attachment figures". In seeking refuge between the empathic female or the comparatively less empathic male, those who chose the former would have had access to more resources and better care and thus a better chance to survive. This implicit female-empathy association would have been seared in the human subconscious and reinforced through observation and practice of seeking solace among primary caretakers (i.e., mostly mothers). This association would have also been strengthened by a social experience of being reared by networks of female caregivers assisting each other (Hrdy, 2000). Whereas women typically assign more importance to emotions than men in interpersonal relations, both sexes prefer to receive emotional support from women. This affinity to gravitate toward women can be witnessed in neonates who favor the soothing voices of their mothers and of women in general to those of men. Such evidence coming from individuals who have yet to be socialized portray the human mind as having a predilection for turning toward women for succor. In other words, it appears that women themselves not only evolved to possess design features that heightened their empathy relative to men, but humans in general have also evolved to perceive women as possessing empathic superiority. Hence, we believe that these two distinct but related processes are crucial in explaining why people seem to veer toward selecting women leaders in times of crisis and in explaining under what conditions such a preference may be the strongest.

An organizational crisis is any major threat to the survival of a system where response time is limited, the situation is ill-structured, and resources are inadequate. Ryan and Haslam defined crisis as "any form of dramatic reduction in financial well-being that has an adverse bearing on the state of an organization". These definitions frame crises as classic engineering problems that require identifying and fixing operations that result in poor use of resources. Recently, some scholars have insisted that these approaches direct attention away from how crises personally affect organizational members and disturb their social connections and attachments. As such, they redefine a crisis by focusing on how relational systems are damaged and persist after the firm recovers, and advised that repairing crises "often requires repairing relational damage". An effective strategy would require post-crisis leaders to convene followers so they could empathize with one another as they toil through troubling events. This, however, does not mean that board members will choose a less qualified leader to steer a company through a crisis because of the candidate's sex. The pool of candidates for top positions is small as is the variability of candidates' credentials. Also, given that companies are ill-prepared to deal with CEO succession in the wake of an emergency, the ancestral prototype of the "leader-healer" in calamitous times may now become salient and favor women. This evolved proclivity toward women in times of crisis coupled with a low base rate of women considered for leadership positions will make their recruitment into precarious positions more visible and thereby open the glass cliff phenomenon to scrutiny. Not all crises are identical, however. We have proposed that humans evolved to seek women in need but if crises differ, and if the sexes have had different success rates in managing each of these types, then it would be reasonable to question whether men and women differ with respect to which crises they are perceived to be better suited to handle as leaders.