Through a Glass Cliff Darkly

Abstract

Abstract. After breaking through the glass ceiling, women often obtain precarious or risky leadership positions in crisis-ridden organizations ( the glass cliff; Ryan & Haslam, 2005 ). Due to women’s minority status, their appointment in a crisis can signal important changes to organizational stakeholders indicating the use of new strategies for overcoming the crisis (signaling theory; Spence, 1973 ). Our study examines whether the media visibility of organizations moderates these signaling effects in ways that either strengthen or weaken glass cliffs. We augmented the archival dataset used by Haslam et al. (2010 ) in which the glass cliff phenomenon was discovered by including data on the media coverage that the Financial Times Stock Exchange index 100 companies received between 2001 and 2005. Our analysis shows that glass cliffs were more pronounced in companies with low media visibility. This suggests that the media visibility of organizations can contribute to increased accountability regarding their personnel decisions in ways that expose women leaders to less discrimination.