• Skills Enhancing HR Practices- designed to ensure appropriately skilled employees, such as comprehensive recruitment, rigorous selection, and extensive training.
• Motivation Enhancing HR Practices - implemented to enhance employee motivation. These include developmental performance management,
  competitive compensation, incentives and rewards, extensive benefits, promotion and career development, and job security.
• Opportunity Enhancing-HR Practices - aimed at empowering employees to use their skills and
  motivation to achieve organizational objectives. Examples include flexible job design, work teams, employee involvement, and information sharing.  

 

Research in Organizational Behavior (2012), N. Ellemers, et al., Article In Press

 

A growing body of research points to the positive benefits of increasing the representation of women in leadership positions. Corporate boards perform better with diverse skills, knowledge and experiences.  

  

The authors connect work on the ''glass cliff'' with research on the ''queen bee'' phenomenon, to demonstrate that promoting women to top positions may not benefit their careers (when glass cliff effects play a role), and does not necessarily help other women advance (due to queen bee effects). 

  

 

The authors identify avenues for future research. They also remind managers and policy makers of their role and responsibilities in creating conditions that are attractive for men as well as women in the organization and as such, how they might shape choices made by women in the organization.

To overcome the problems of groupthink, both process and insight solutions have been proposed for decision-making meetings. Process solutions include bringing external experts to meetings or having group members discuss the group's ideas with trusted individuals outside the group, the goal being to extend the debate. Insight solutions help teams improve their decision-making by understanding how they make decisions and the politics and biases in play. 

The authors argue that while any intervention is valuable, both approaches can be problematic. They propose a three-lever framework instead, the goal of which is to create a culture in which differing opinions can be freely expressed. Drawing upon relevant research, the authors propose specific methods to deal with the associated challenges of each of the levers they propose:

• Lever 1 - Knowing: Ensuring that leaders know what they need to know to make good decisions by effectively managing the flow of information to the executive team and its members.
• Lever 2 - Saying: Ensuring the ability of executive team members to articulate relevant information - to say what needs to be said. 
• Lever 3 - Sustaining: Ensuring the sustainability of solutions by working to enhance the capacity of executive team members to reflect in-the-moment on the effectiveness of group decision making and intervene where necessary.