Person:

Dobbin, Frank

Institutional investors have come to play a central role in financial markets since the early 1970s. They controlled about three out of ten shares of Fortune 500 companies in 1970. Today they control seven out of ten. The aging of the baby boom generation, coupled with new fiduciary requirements for defined benefit pension plans, contributed to this change. Agency theory offered a litany of innovations designed to ensure that executives pursued the interests of shareholders, rather than feathering their own nests. Institutional investors promoted the theory with a vengeance, encouraging firms through shareholder proposals and private bidding to put its prescriptions into place. This article examines the role of institutional investors in promoting changes in corporate management under the banner of shareholder value. It reviews evidence that these changes did little to promote share value and that they resulted in several disadvantages for the American worker-owner.

During the civil rights era in the 1960s, the federal government passed a series of measures to end racial and gender discrimination in the workplace. Yet the laws and regulations did not clearly define what constituted illegal discrimination and gave only weak enforcement power to federal agencies. As a result, over the following decades, corporations themselves have defined how they will comply with civil rights law. Human resources managers have created a series of programs designed to improve the status of women and minorities in the workplace, from formalized hiring and promotion procedures to diversity training to mentoring programs. Since firms have made different decisions about which programs to implement, researchers can track firms across time to study the causes and effects of the various programs. In this article, we review many studies, some of which are our own, to find out what factors lead firms to implement anti-discrimination programs and which of these programs are actually successful at increasing workforce and management diversity. We find that regulatory pressure from the federal government has become less influential in driving firms to adopt diversity programs. Instead, advocacy from groups within the firm and industry culture have played greater roles in recent decades. We also find that some of the most popular equal opportunity programs are not actually the most effective. Formalized hiring and promotion procedures, diversity training, and grievance procedures do not lead to improvements in workforce diversity. We argue that these programs are ineffective because they treat managers as the source of the problem. The programs that do lead to results, such as recruitment initiatives and diversity taskforces, are successful because they engage managers in finding solutions. We also conclude that members of historically disadvantaged groups do not benefit from networking programs, but they do benefit from mentoring programs, which link them directly to managers who can help them advance in their careers. Our findings have important public policy implications. Despite progress since the civil rights era, women and minorities are still underrepresented in management-level positions. Therefore, it remains as pressing as ever to understand which programs are effective in promoting workplace equality. The conclusions we present here offer guidance for managers deciding which programs to implement, courts awarding injunctive relief in discrimination suits, and agencies enforcing equal opportunity laws.

Women now make up a sixth of corporate board members in the Fortune 500. Some scholars suggest that women board members boost financial performance, and thus stock price, by making boards more effective. Indeed, early studies showed a correlation between women on boards and both profits and stock price. But more rigorous studies have suggested that women have little effect on profits and may have negative effects on stock price. In a quantitative study of the consequences of female board member appointments, using data from over 400 leading corporations for the period 1997 to 2005, we find little evidence that women undermine board effectiveness but some evidence that institutional investors disfavor firms that appoint women board members. Following the appointment of a woman board member, firms do not experience decreases in profitability but do see decreases in share value. We then explore the effects of female appointments on shareholding by different groups of institutional investors. We predict that fund managers holding large positions in leading firms, whose actions are followed by the investment community, will take care not to sell off stock following accession of women to boards. We predict that the same will be true of all public pension fund managers, who have long been advocates of board diversity. But we suggest that small-holding institutional investors, and investors that do not manage public pension funds, may react negatively to the appointment of women to boards due to unwitting bias. The statistical results are consistent with the interpretation that bias among institutional investors who do not carefully scrutinize their own motives leads to reductions in shareholding after firms appoint women board members, and ensuing declines in share price.

While some U.S. corporations have adopted a host of diversity management programs, many have done little or nothing. We explore the forces promoting six diversity programs in a national sample of 816 firms over 23 years. Institutional theory suggests that external pressure for innovation reinforces internal advocacy. We argue that external pressure and internal advocacy serve as alternatives, such that when external pressure is already high, increases in internal advocacy will not alter the likelihood of program adoption. Moreover, institutional theory points to functional need as a driver of innovation. We argue that in the case of innovations designed to achieve new societal goals, functional need, as defined in this case by the absence of workforce diversity or the presence of regulatory oversight, is less important than corporate culture. Our findings help explain the spotty coverage of diversity programs. Firms that lack workforce diversity are no more likely than others to adopt programs, but firms with large contingents of women managers are more likely to do so. Pro-diversity industry and corporate cultures promote diversity programs. The findings carry implications for public policy.

Agency theorists diagnosed the economic malaise of the 1970s as the result of executive obsession with corporate stability over profitability. Management swallowed many of the pills agency theorists prescribed to increase entrepreneurialism and risk-taking; stock options, dediversification, debt financing, and outsider board members. Management did not swallow the pills prescribed to moderate risk: executive equity holding and independent boards. Thus, in practice, the remedy heightened corporate risk-taking without imposing constraints. Both recessions of the new millennium can be traced directly to these changes in strategy. To date, regulators have proposed nothing to undo the perverse incentives of the new “shareholder value” system.

Do America's costly diversity-management programs work? Some do and some don't. The best idea is to assign clear responsibility for change.