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Technology-based SMEs with women in their top management teams are more innovative

Spanish version: sl.ugr.es/mujeres_empresas

French version: sl.ugr.es/mujeres_empresasFR

That’s the conclusion of a research carried out by two professors from the University of Granada belonging to the Department of Business Administration

They presented their work with the occasion of the International Women’s Day, celebrated on March 8

They have analyzed a sample of 205 Spanish technology SMEs

Technology enterprises whose top management team is more balanced in number of men and women implement a greater innovation on both the product they make and the manufacturing process.

That’s the conclusion of a research carried out by two professors from the University of Granada (UGR) belonging to the Department of Business Administration. They presented their work with the occasion of the International Women’s Day, celebrated on March 8.

The paper analyzes the influence of management capabilities on the innovation performance of technology-based SMEs and the role that gender diversity in the top management team plays in this relationship.

The researchers carried out their study using a sample of 205 Spanish SMEs from technology sectors and a hierarchical regression analysis (a statistical analysis for estimating the relations between the studied variables). The results confirm that management capabilities have a positive impact on both product and process innovation.

Moreover, «gender diversity in the top management team moderates this relationship positively, so management capabilities have a greater influence on both product and process innovation when the management team is more balanced in number of men and women», says Jenny María Ruiz Jiménez, one of the authors of this paper.

This study contributes to better understanding of the factors that explain how management capabilities translate into greater organizational achievements and argues the need to analyze the role of top management teams and their composition more extensively, especially in the context of technology SMEs.

Additionally, this study tackles the absolutely current question of the role of women in firms’ top management.

«Although women have gradually been assuming more leadership in political and social arenas, they continue to occupy minority and secondary positions in business, and this tendency is even stronger in technological sectors», says María del Mar Fuentes Fuentes, professor of Business Administration at the University of Granada.

The research also contributes new evidence to the small number of studies that analyze the effect of gender diversity in top management teams on innovation, as well as the particularly inefficient study in the field of technology SMEs.

Bibliographic references:

Management capabilities, innovation, and gender diversity in the top management team: An empirical analysis in technology-based SMEs.

Ruiz-Jiménez Jenny María, Fuentes-Fuentes María del Mar (2016).

BRQ Business Research Quarterly, Volume 19, Issue 2, Pages 107-121.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.brq.2015.08.003

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  1. The two authors of the study: Jenny María Ruiz Jiménez and María del Mar Fuentes Fuentes

Contact:

Jenny María Ruiz Jiménez

Departamento de Organización de Empresas (Department of Business Administration), UGR

Telephone: (+34) 958 241 000 Ext. 20544

Mobile phone: (+34) 605 083 510

E-mail: jmruizj@ugr.es