The Glass Cliff Phenomenon

SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review, I’m Sarah Green. I’m talking today with Susanne Bruckmuller, a research associate at the Universitat Erlangen-Nuremberg. She’s the co-author with Nyla Branscombe of an article in the January-February issue of HBR called, “How Women End Up on the Glass Cliff.”

Susanne, thanks so much for talking with us.

SUSANNE BRUCKMULLER: Well, you’re welcome

SARAH GREEN: Could you talk a little bit about what the “glass cliff” concept is for some of our listeners who might not be familiar with it?

SUSANNE BRUCKMULLER: Well, you have probably heard of the glass ceiling, which is a metaphor for the invisible barrier that many women face when they try to reach upper management positions. There are two researchers in England, Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam of the University of Exeter, they looked a bit closer into the circumstances under which women do reach upper management positions. So they investigated when the top 100 companies at the London Stock Exchange appointed women to their boards as opposed to when they appointed men. And what they thought was really interesting. They found that companies were more likely to appoint a woman when they had experienced a considerably poor stock market performance in the prior months and men were more likely to be appointed through similar positions in companies that have been more stable. Ryan and Haslam called this phenomenon of appointing women in times of organizational crisis, the “glass cliff.” Basically, to illustrate the precarious of the situations that these women find themselves in.

One could say that they have managed to break through the glass ceiling and so now they’re on top. But their situation is more risky and more precarious than it would be if they were leading in a successful organization. So just like standing on top of a cliff, it’s more dangerous than standing on top of a mountain. That’s why it’s called the glass cliff. In parallel to the glass ceiling metaphor, but also to show the precariousness and the risk that these women face.

SARAH GREEN: So in your research, you really focused on trying to find out how women ended up on these cliffs. Can you tell us a little bit about the experiments you did to sort of dig into this?

SUSANNE BRUCKMULLER: Sure. Well, one of the big unknown questions about the glass cliff is what precisely causes this effect. So probably, it’s a quite complex phenomenon and there are very many factors that contribute to the effect. But the piece of the puzzle that Nyla Branscombe and I were interested in was people’s expectations and their typical assumptions about gender and leadership. And so what we did was we decided to strip away some of the distractions of real life cases and instead, to study the glass cliff on a very controlled conditions in the lab.

So we conducted two studies and what we had our participants do was in the first study, to read fabricated newspaper articles about a company. And then for half the participants we told them that this company was doing pretty well economically. It was really successful. And then the other half of participants, we told that the company was struggling with some major difficulties. And then what we also varied for these participants was the information about the history of leadership in this company, what the norm of leadership was. So we also gave them some information about previous leaders in this company, who the founder of the company was, and who the present CEO was and so on and so forth.

And for some of the participants, on the previous leaders that were mentioned all had male first names. So the history of leadership was male in this company. And then for the other half of participants, the previous leaders had female first names, so the norm of leadership was actually female. And then after participants had read this information about this company, we told them that the present CEO of this company was going to retire and asked them about their opinion, who should be the new CEO. And then they read brief descriptions of two candidates for this CEO position in the company, a man and a woman. Then we just simply asked them who they would choose as the new CEO.

And what we found was that when the company has been led by men, there was a very clear glass cliff. So among the participants who thought that the company was doing well, the majority chose a male candidate as the future CEO. But among the participants who thought that the company was in a crisis, most participants actually chose the female candidate.

But then what’s really interesting is that when female leadership was the norm in this company, this class cliff disappeared entirely. So people were equally likely to choose either of the two candidates and there was no gender bias at all, regardless of how the company was doing.

So what we think that tells us is that the glass cliff must have something to do with the way most organizations have been historically structured or often still structured today with normal representation of men in leadership positions. So in simple words, men are the norm in leadership. And as long as everything’s going well, people tend to stick to this norm. But if some things are wrong, then maybe you consider alternatives. And then women have a better chance.

SARAH GREEN: It’s interesting because I think I would have expected that maybe some of this phenomenon would just be based on people saying, oh, well, things at this company are in trouble, so we need a change. And that a leader of a different gender would seem to represent more of a change. But it sounds like actually, that that change only happened in one direction. That the fictional companies that had been historically female, there was no rush to have a male leader in those companies.

SUSANNE BRUCKMULLER: Right. And that is actually a very interesting aspect of these results. So it’s not just a status quo bias or something like that. It’s not just that these men have messed up and we want a woman. But what we think is that is also has something to do with just a strong stereotypical connection between maleness and leadership. So typically, we expect leaders to be male. And we also have some stereotypical assumptions about what kind of leaders men are and what kind of leaders women are.

That’s a very interesting aspect of the results of this first study because if it was really just a status quo bias, if it was really just that we want change if whatever we have before didn’t work, or we want to keep whatever we have before if things are going great, then we would have expected this reversal in the female history condition. But that’s not what we find. And we think that one of the reasons is that stereotypes about gender and leadership also play an important role in this context. And there’s actually other research that shows that if you present people with men in leadership positions, then that kind of reinforces stereotypes about gender and leadership the way people have been before. But then if you talk about women in leadership positions, then these stereotypes are not as strong anymore. So that might be one explanation why we don’t find this reversal in the female leadership condition.

And so in a second study, we actually tried to tackle these stereotypical views of male and female leadership a bit more closely and see what role that also plays for the glass cliff.

SARAH GREEN: Can you tell us a little bit more about how you tried to sort of unpack these different stereotypes, and what you found when you did that?

SUSANNE BRUCKMULLER: So in our second study, participants again, read about a company that was either doing really well or was performing poorly. And then participants again, read about a female and a male candidate for an open leadership position in a company. But this time, before we asked participants to make their choice for the new leader, we also asked them just for their general perceptions of the two candidates. And we asked them how they perceived the candidates with regard to some stereotypically male leader attributes. So for example, independence, decisiveness, competitiveness. And we also asked them how they perceived these two candidates with regard to some stereotypically female leadership attributes. So for example, the ability to encourage others, or the willingness to cooperate with others. And then afterwards, we asked them to make their decision.

And then we related the stereotypical perceptions that participants had of the two candidates with who they actually chose as the new leader in this company. And what we found that was when a company was doing well, the attribution or the ascription of the stereotypically male strength was most predictive of who participants preferred as a new leader. So they preferred the candidate that they thought had most of these stereotypically male strengths. But when the company was in crisis, then they choose the candidate that they thought had more of these stereotypically female skills. And then accordingly, both participants again, chose the male candidate to have the successful company, but the female candidate to lead the company in crisis.

SARAH GREEN: So is the assumption there that stereotypically female qualities, which might include something– communication, emotional intelligence, all those sorts of things, are somehow that’s better suited to a crisis situation?

SUSANNE BRUCKMULLER: Well, at least that’s what people expect or what people might think. You have to remember that these were just student participants who evaluated these candidates and told us what they think about these candidates, and then made a selection. But these weren’t actual companies and not actual candidates. So it’s really more about what people think and what people expect stereotypically. Not so much what it actually effective in a crisis.

SARAH GREEN: You know, I’m curious as we’re talking about these gender stereotypes, of course any kind of stereotype like that is going to be informed by your cultural context. And because you’re in Germany and your co-author, Nyla Branscombe, is in Kansas, I’m just wondering if you ran into any of these cultural differences? Although of course, I know that relatively speaking, the United States and Germany are actually quite close. I’m just curious how that affected your research.

SUSANNE BRUCKMULLER: Actually, a lot less than you might expect. So Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam have done their research in Great Britain and they find the glass cliff. And then we did this research in the United States and found that people preferred men for successful companies and women for companies in crisis. And we actually did some follow-up studies in Germany where we found the exact same pattern again. So maybe there might be some small, nuanced differences between the countries in terms of gender stereotypes. But I think in general, what we think a typical male leader or a typical female leader is like, I think these stereotypes are very similar actually between Germany and the US.

SARAH GREEN: Although, Germany does have a female leader, Angela Merkel. And of course, the United States so far has not, so that could be one difference. But I don’t know if this research really applies to public leadership as much as just private companies?

SUSANNE BRUCKMULLER: Yeah, that’s actually an open question. Whether you know that also would affect how people vote in terms of political leadership. I think you can compare maybe some of the processes that go on within parties, when they decide who might run as a candidate or who might become the head of a party or something like this, where they would also how, in a democratic election, who people vote for. That’s an open question.

But actually, it’s interesting that you bring up Angela Merkel. It’s always difficult to tell what exactly the reasons are for a particular woman’s appointment to a specific position under specific circumstances. I think her story actually also kind of fits the general glass cliff pattern. Because she became head of her party, the Christian Democratic Union, at the end of the ’90s, beginning of the new Millennium. And that was when this party was struggling with its most severe crisis in that party history. So of course, if you look at her now, then that’s a success story. But when you look at one of the most important steps in her career, becoming the head of her party, then that also happened when they faced some major difficulties. So you usually cna’t make too much of one example, but actually, this is an example that kind of fits in here.

SARAH GREEN: Yeah. Well that sounds like it would actually, potentially be an interesting area for future research. And speaking of future research, I know you do a lot of work in the area of intergroup comparisons. And so I wanted to ask how what you’ve done with the glass cliff works with, or is informed by, your work on intergroup comparisons. And maybe for people who aren’t as familiar with intergroup comparisons, what are those?

SUSANNE BRUCKMULLER: OK, well intergroup comparison, basically just refers to when you compare two groups to each other. How do you draw these comparisons? So, for example, you compare women to men, but you can also compare men to women. And how the glass cliff researcher fits into this other research interest is that in general, I’m interested in what we perceive as normative or typical of certain situations or certain categories of people and sort of what the default in our head is.

And so one example is the question of how we picture the typical manager. How that affects who we choose for leadership positions. But I’m also more generally interested in who we perceive as more typical of different social categories and how that influences who we compare to whom and who we focus our explanations on. And how that feeds back into how we perceive the groups that we compare.

So, for example, one result that came out of our glass cliff studies that was really interesting in this context was that when we looked more closely at these stereotypical attributes that people ascribed to the male and female candidates, what we saw was that it was actually the perceptions of the male candidate that shifted more or that moved around more depending on how the company it was doing. It was not so much how people perceived the female candidate. So, it really seemed the perceptions that we have or the stereotypical assumptions that we have about men in leadership are as important, or at least, as important for understanding the glass cliff as the stereotypes about women in leadership.

And if you look at discussions of the glass cliff for previous research, and very often it’s framed in terms of why do women end up in these glass cliff positions? Why do people prefer women in times of crisis? What is it that women have that people think makes them better suited in a crisis situation? And that’s actually something very typical that if men are the norm in leadership, then if you find some gender difference that surprises you then you would focus your explanation on women and how they are different from men. But you wouldn’t actually look as much at men and this other side of the story in how that also feeds into it.

SARAH GREEN: That’s really interesting. In that case, we’re used to focusing on women as being the sort of the different ones, the ones who have a gender, and men as being sort of this norm. But actually, it sounds like in this case, it may be men who are the ones who are really performing a gendered role?

SUSANNE BRUCKMULLER: Yes, actually that’s– well, I’m not sure whether I would say it’s only men. It’s not only men who are performing a gendered role here. But it’s important to also see men as performing a gendered role and not only look at women and see how their gender is something that drives the effect here. But stereotypes about men in leadership and just the general higher representation of men in leadership positions is also something that we definitely have to consider when we try to understand who was chosen for leadership positions, under which circumstances, and why.

SARAH GREEN: Well, it sounds like a fertile area for future research. Susanne, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us today.

SUSANNE BRUCKMULLER: You’re welcome.

SARAH GREEN: That was Susanna Bruckmuller of the Universitat Erlangen-Nuremberg. The article, “How Women End Up on the Glass Cliff” is in the January-February 2011 issue of HBR. For more, go to hbr.org.