Exploring leadership behavior in support of gender diversity as a competitive advantage: A case study on Nordic service industry
Master thesis
Permanent lenke
https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3035439Utgivelsesdato
2022Metadata
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Sammendrag
This dissertation explores the leadership behavior and perspective through leadershipontologies that support gender diversity to gain competitive advantage. The present and pastliterature on diversity leadership is focused more on identifying to “fix” diversity with theend goal of improving the KPI of the organization. Only a few studies have demonstrated theleadership behaviors to embrace diversity as a strength, a source of value, and a competitiveadvantage. Therefore, this research aims to fill this gap in the literature, as it focuses on theleadership perceptions to get meaningful progress in the corporate gender diversity programs.The research questions then become:Which leadership behaviors support gender diversity to achieve competitive advantage?A study aimed to answer this question and look at all three leadership ontologies: tripodontology, DAC, and PAC, and how they would function in the Nordic hotel and IT servicesectors. Empirical data was collected through interviews of employees in the formal andinformal leadership positions in 2 hotels and 1 IT company.This dissertation has the world view of interpretivism, and the analysis is qualitative contentanalysis. And the data reveals that there are six main themes of relevance to the problemquestion. The findings suggest that tripod ontology, where leadership influences most of itsintegration and expects followers and shared goals to follow, has adverse effects on genderdiversity in the hotel and IT industry. DAC ontology which focuses on collective interest,coordination of knowledge and works and has a widespread agreement on the overall goals,mission, and vision, has limited practice. Still, it can diversely affect the integration of genderdiversity in both industries. PAC ontology which defines leadership as a collective pursuit ofdelivering on purpose, not a privilege of the few, has a mixed findings in this research. In thehotel sector, leaders tried to implement gender equality within their organization in a way thathasn’t had known to have a business value, on the other hand, the IT sector has an excellentpotential to implement PAC to integrate gender.This dissertation is based on a paradigm that allows for consistent re-evaluation of theproblem question. However, the main recommendation is to develop the problem questionearly and review the literature at a stage where one can utilize the literature to form a problemquestion. In addition, this dissertation recommends the careful use of leadership definitions.Because there are so much disagreement and vagueness among scholars in this field, this thesis also suggests combining leadership studies with quantifiable data besides qualitativedata.