Effects of founder gender and workplace romance status on recruits’ evaluations of early-stage ventures

ABSTRACT

We conduct a mixed-method, multi-study investigation using a role congruity theory framework to examine prospective employees’ attitudes toward working for male- and female-led ventures. Results using data collected from business students, alumni, and executives in India reveal three insights: (1) prospective employees report similar evaluations for male- and female-led ventures under normal circumstances but evaluate female-led ventures more favorably than male-led ventures when the entrepreneur has a hierarchical workplace romance; (2) favorable attitudes toward female-led rather than male-led ventures when the entrepreneur is engaged in a hierarchical workplace romance are motivated by benevolent sexism; and (3) although respondents report a higher inclination to work for ventures without (vs with) a policy prohibiting workplace romance, the decline in willingness to work for an entrepreneur engaged in a workplace romance is higher for female- than male-led ventures. We discuss implications and directions for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Entrepreneur gender
• workplace romance
• role congruity theory

Acknowledgments

We thankfully acknowledge the contribution of respondents who patiently answered our questions as part of the multiple studies reported in our paper. Prior versions of this paper were presented at the Academy of Management Conference in Atlanta (GA) and the Eastern Academy of Management – International Conference in Dubrovnik (Croatia), where it benefited from audience comments and suggestions. Daniel Turban, Alka Gupta, and Anthony Butterfield provided useful feedback on earlier drafts of the paper. Editor Annaleena Parhankangas and the three anonymous reviewers were tremendously helpful throughout the review process. Of course, all errors and omissions remain our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00472778.2023.2197028

Notes

¹ As we discuss later, lateral workplace romance – such as between co-founders Whitney Wolfe and Justin Mateen at Tinder (Boorstin, 2022) – is also an issue of growing concern with the increasing popularity of mixed-sex founding teams (Yang & Aldrich, 2014), but it is not the topic of our inquiry in the current research.

² Our research was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the institution where the studies were conducted, and one coauthor was also working there when the studies were conducted. Participants were encouraged to ask questions and were debriefed after each of the studies was over. Participants were asked to provide their e-mail address, which we subsequently used to share a one-page summary of our overall research findings with them. Experimental materials are provided in an online appendix.

³ India ranks 153rd on the Gender Development Index and 133rd on the Women, Peace, and Security Index. At the same time, it also ranks 15th in the world on female political empowerment (compared to the US, which ranks 98th) and School Life Expectancy (measured by UNESCO as average duration of schooling in years) is higher for girls than for boys in India (School Life Expectancy is statistically equivalent for boys and girls in the US).

⁴ GEM places India 22nd of the 48 countries surveyed (Shukla et al., 2020), relative to 13th for the US (Bosma & Kelley, 2018), on TEA. For comparison, Angola had the highest TEA (41%) and Cyprus lowest (4%), with India at 11.4% and the US at 15.6%.

⁵ Initially, we intended to control for respondent work experience in years, but respondent age and work experience were highly correlated (r = 0.88, p < .001). To avoid multicollinearity issues, we dropped respondents’ work experience from further analysis.

⁶ Results are similar when we use ANCOVA instead of regression for analyzing data. ANCOVA results are available from the authors.

⁷ The average age in this sample was 24.5 years, with 1.5-year work experience prior to starting the MBA. All respondents were searching for full-time corporate positions at the time of this study, so issues regarding hiring and recruitment were quite salient to them.

⁸ Once again, respondents’ age is highly correlated with respondents’ work experience (r = 0.86, p < .001), so we did not include the latter in further analysis to avoid multicollinearity issue. Results are similar when we use ANCOVA instead of regression.

⁹ We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

¹⁰ An extramarital workplace romance can also involve a single founder and a married subordinate. In supplementary analyses, we found that respondents were not significantly less likely to want to work at the company when the subordinate involved in workplace romance was married rather than unmarried (M_s = 4.43 and 4.75 respectively, F (1, 237) = 2.99, ns).

¹¹ Analyses reveal that the gender composition of the sample does not affect results.

¹² Participants were asked “how likely are you to accept a job offer from this company?,” “how likely are you to want to work at this company?,” “how likely are you to be excited about working at this company?,” “how desirable do you find this job offer?,” “how desirable do you find the opportunity to work at this company?,” and “how desirable is the prospect of working for this founder?” Using a longer measure for this study helps ensure that the findings were generalizable across measures and did not reflect idiosyncratic aspects of the measure used previously (Gupta et al., 2014).