Are gender diverse teams more successful? The relationship between mixed leadership and organizational performance

The share of women in leadership positions is currently in the focus of public attention in Germany, in particular due to the discussion about the introduction of a legal women's quota. This article reviews extant empirical research on the relationship between gender diversity in leadership teams (i. e., mixed leadership") and quantitative measures of organizational performance (e. g., return on assets, return on equity or Tobin's Q). Thereby it becomes apparent that mixed leadership is not unambiguously linked to better organizational performance. In fact it seems that the positive potential of mixed leadership is contingent on further boundary conditions; we discuss these conditions based on recent empirical findings.