Women hold up the shattering sky? Performance feedback on multiple conflicting goals and women’s representation in top management teams in the public sector

Abstract

Previous research on the glass cliff phenomenon has primarily explored the impact of performance decline on women in leadership based on single objectives, overlooking the complexity of managing performance in the public sector. This study adopts a multigoal perspective to explore how performance feedback in a dual-goal scenario affects gender composition in top management teams (TMTs) in Chinese local governments. Drawing on behavioral theory, it differentiates between unambiguous and ambiguous feedback as two distinct types of organizational performance feedback, to test their influence on women’s proportion in TMTs. A unique data set covering 276 Chinese municipal governments from 2010-2018 was used to investigate how performance on two conflicting objectives, economic growth and environmental protection pursued by Chinese local governments, affects women’s proportion in mayoral teams. Results from fractional logit regression suggest that unambiguous failure is positively associated with the proportion of women in TMTs. However, ambiguous performance feedback is negatively related to the proportion of women in TMTs. Implications for research on gender composition in the upper echelons and performance feedback on multiple objectives are discussed.