Communion then Agency: Women’s Ascension to the Hospital CEO Role
Abstract
Leader prototypes have long been conceptualized as agentic, characterized by behaviours such as assertiveness, tactful aggression, confidence, and similar. Scholars studying women in leadership often point to the association between agency and masculinity in explaining women’s historical underrepresentation in leadership positions, noting that agency is particularly expected in senior leadership positions. Yet, much less is known about the utility of more communal leader behaviours such as collaboration, subordinate development, relationship formation, and similar, which are associated with femininity. Most research investigating women in leadership does not explicitly examine women in senior leadership, and those which do tend to rely on secondary data. Within the present study, I collect primary data to examine how communal and agentic behaviours influence women’s career ascension in achieving the role of Ontario hospital CEO.
To do so, I used semi-structured interviewing and elite interviewing techniques to interview 43 women CEOs of Ontario hospitals as well as 10 Ontario hospital board chairs involved in their appointment. Findings are grouped under three key headings: contextual themes, career ascension themes, and themes relating to longer-term future investments in organizational success. Findings show that communal behaviours positively contribute to participants’ career ascension, and that the Ontario hospital CEO job role strongly entails communal leadership behaviors. Further, throughout their careers, many participants engaged in agentic behaviours in interesting and tactful ways. Collectively, pronounced communal behaviors and subtle agentic behaviors positively contributed to CEO participants’ emergence as CEOs.