ESSEC Business School Prof. Stefan Gröschl shows that women reach senior leadership not through mentoring programs, but through sustained sponsorship – often by male superiors – combining real career opportunities with public legitimacy and trust.

Women in Leadership and the Power of Sponsors by CoBS Editor Antonin Delobre. Related research: Gröschl, S., Gabaldon, P., Hahn, T., & Kelan, E. K. (2024). The emergence and effects of sponsors for women leaders. Gender, Work & Organization.

Profs. Stefan Gröschl, Patricia Gabaldon, Tobias Hahn, and Elisabeth K. Kelan’s research – The Emergence and Effects of Sponsors for Women Leaders – addresses a persistent puzzle in gender and leadership research: why, despite decades of equality policies and a growing focus on diversity, women remain underrepresented in senior executive roles.

The authors argue that one of the most decisive yet insufficiently understood mechanisms behind women’s advancement is career sponsorship. Sponsorship, in their framing, is not a vague form of encouragement or general support. It is a specific career intervention in which a senior, influential person uses personal and organizational capital to advocate for a junior colleague and place them into roles that increase their visibility and promotability.

Separating the Sponsors from the Mentors

Early in the research the authors separate sponsorship from mentoring, organizations often treating them as interchangeable. Mentoring typically supports organizational socialization and development by offering advice, feedback, and encouragement. Mentors can be found at multiple levels and are not necessarily in positions of power.

Sponsorship is different because it is power-based and action-oriented. Indeed, sponsors are senior figures who publicly and privately advocate for their protégées, broker introductions to decision makers, assign high-profile work, and push for promotions, thereby taking reputational risk.

This distinction matters because women have historically had greater access to mentors than sponsors. Mentoring can help women navigate workplace culture, but it often does not deliver the decisive career opportunities needed to reach top management. The authors’ argument is that understanding sponsorship – rather than only mentoring – helps explain how women break through into executive positions.

Helping Others: A question of “birds of a feather”

Previous research on women’s ascension within corporate hierarchy has mostly been shaped by the concept of homophily: the tendency for people to form relationships with others who resemble them on salient characteristics such as gender.

As such, if senior leadership is disproportionately male, homophily suggests that powerful men will sponsor other men, which creates an exclusionary cycle for women. The argument is that women would then be less likely to benefit from sponsorship, not necessarily because they lack competence, but because the sponsorship channel that accelerates careers is structurally skewed. Furthermore, at the same time, the small number of senior women reduces the availability of same-sex sponsorship ties, meaning women cannot easily rely on homophilous matching as a solution.

However, one of the research paper’s most important findings is that women leaders in this sample were predominantly sponsored by men. This result is significant because it differs from the expectation that sponsorship relationships should be shaped primarily by homophily and same-sex ties.

In the interviews carried out for the research, women often explained the gender of their sponsors in structural terms: they had rarely had female bosses, and top leadership remained male-dominated, so male sponsors were the most available potential sponsors. What matters is that the sponsorship did not appear to be driven by formal corporate sponsorship programs pushing men to sponsor women.

Women in Leadership: Proximity and visibility in the workplace are key

Instead, sponsors were typically managers or senior leaders who had direct knowledge of the women’s work and potential through supervisory relationships, and who chose to invest their personal capital voluntarily. The authors interpret this as evidence that while homophily matters as a general pattern, it is not the whole story. Where close working relationships exist and competence is visible, sponsorship can emerge across gender lines, even in male-dominated settings.

The study also shows that sponsorship most often emerged informally rather than through structured programs. Many participants described sponsor relationships as loose, undefined, and not deliberately pursued at the outset. Internal formal sponsorship programs, when they existed, were rarely cited as the source of meaningful sponsorship. Similarly, institutionalized women’s networks or associations were perceived as useful for solidarity and emotional support, but not as mechanisms that produced the high-visibility assignments and advocacy required for advancement into the highest ranks.

In other words, these formal structures may help women cope with organizational cultures and share advice, but they do not substitute for personalized advocacy by individuals with power. The authors treat this as a crucial insight because it implies that organizations cannot simply “install” sponsorship through a program in the way they might install training. Sponsorship requires personal commitment, political capital, and trust, and those conditions often develop through ongoing professional relationships rather than through standardized matching processes.

In addition, Gröschl and his fellow researchers look at the external dimension – for while many sponsors were direct supervisors within the company, some emerged from external networks such as former colleagues, peers who became recruiters, or industry contacts. This expands the traditional definition of sponsors as higher-ranked individuals within the same organization.

External sponsors can broaden the range of career opportunities, particularly when internal growth paths are constrained, and they may act without any organizational pressure. The authors interpret this as a rationale for encouraging women to build diversified networks across organizational boundaries, since such networks can become alternative channels of sponsorship when internal structures are limited or biased.

Sponsors Support in Several Ways

To explain what sponsors actually do, the authors introduce a highly useful lens: sponsorship activities can be understood through the typology of social support, which includes informational, instrumental, emotional, and appraisal support. They consolidate these categories into two broader forms to clarify the data:

• Assistive support
• And appreciative support.

The first of these – assistive support – covers tangible, concrete help, including informational and instrumental support. Appreciative support, on the other hand, covers intangible reinforcement, including emotional and appraisal support. This distinction is in sorts the backbone of the researchers’ main argument: what drives women’s advancement is not just that sponsors create opportunities, but that they combine opportunity creation with validation and confidence-building.

Assistive support appears most clearly in the way sponsors provide women with stretch assignments and roles that expand scope, responsibility, and visibility. Stretch assignments push leaders outside their comfort zone, expose them to strategically important work, and create experiential learning that accelerates development. In the interviews, women described sponsors who “stretched” them continuously, asked them for increasingly challenging tasks, and trusted them with responsibilities they might not have received otherwise.

Sponsors also supported women by placing them in new roles, in some cases involving geographic moves or major functional shifts. Another assistive mechanism identified in the research data is the provision of fallback options, where sponsors encouraged women to try a challenging role with the reassurance that they could return to a previous path if it did not work out. This matters because it reduces the perceived downside risk of taking a leap, especially in contexts where women may feel more scrutinized or fear that failure will be punished more severely. These forms of assistive support are, in effect, the direct career accelerators: they produce visibility, build track records, and position women as credible candidates for promotion.

Sponsors: The Importance of the human touch – and responsibility

However, the paper’s more original claim is that assistive support is rarely effective without appreciative support. Appreciative support includes expressions of trust, empathy, and belief in the protégé’s potential, along with evaluative feedback that helps the protégé reinterpret herself as capable of leadership. In the interviews, many women described self-doubt, limited confidence, or a reluctance to self-promote, sometimes rooted in the belief that strong performance should speak for itself rather than needing active advocacy.

Sponsors’ appreciative support counteracted these tendencies by explicitly affirming women’s competence and by legitimizing them in the eyes of others. One especially vivid example in the findings involves a woman leader assigned to a highly challenging context abroad, where women were rare in leadership roles. The sponsor’s support did not only consist of giving her the assignment; it also included publicly introducing her as highly capable, which simultaneously reassured her and signalled legitimacy to stakeholders who might otherwise question her authority.

This example captures the authors’ central mechanism: appreciation is not merely “nice to have.” When combined with concrete opportunity, it becomes a stabilizing force that enables women to take risks, persist through anxiety, and convert stretch experiences into career growth.

The most visible outcomes include promotions, access to senior leadership roles, and expanded exposure to decision makers. Importantly, the study does not find that sponsored women are pushed into purely supportive or peripheral roles lacking strategic relevance. Many participants held positions with significant responsibility, including profit-and-loss roles, leadership of divisions, and country-level executive positions.

Of Change and Trust

Alongside these tangible outcomes, Gröschl et al. highlight a second category: the development of self-confidence and self-efficacy. Women repeatedly described the moment when a sponsor recognized leadership potential in them as transformative, because it changed how they saw themselves and what they believed they could do. In this sense, sponsorship does not only open doors; it also reshapes internal perceptions of legitimacy, which then increases the willingness to accept future opportunities.

A further conclusion concerns time and trust. The authors argue that effective sponsorship tends to be a long-term process rather than a one-off intervention. Trust and confidence are built gradually, often through close working relationships such as supervisor–subordinate ties or long-standing connections. This challenges portrayals of sponsorship as short-term or transactional. It also helps explain why company-run sponsorship programs often disappoint: executives may resist advocating for people they do not know well, and the program structure may not allow enough time for mutual trust to form.

Sponsorship involves reputational risk, so it is most likely when sponsors have strong evidence of competence and feel personally invested. These insights push the article toward organizational implications: rather than focusing on imposing sponsorship relationships through formal programs, companies may need to create conditions that enable trust-based sponsorship to emerge, while also ensuring that women receive access to the same career-defining assignments that build executive track records.

Women in Leadership: The road ahead

If organizations want more women in senior leadership, they would be wise to stop treating mentoring as the primary solution and address the mechanisms of sponsorship. This means ensuring that women have access to stretch assignments and visible roles at every career stage, monitoring whether those opportunities are distributed fairly, and building cultures where managers can offer fallback options and support risk-taking rather than condemning it.

It also means recognizing that women may be less likely to proactively seek sponsors because of doubts about their potential, so sponsors often need to initiate relationships and provide appreciation alongside opportunity.

Finally, women can move away from relying on a single sponsor and toward a constellation of sponsors inside and outside the organization. This will have the effect of offering diverse opportunities across career stages, especially in dynamic workplaces where people shift roles frequently.

Useful links:

• Learn more on Prof. Stefan Gröschl and his work and visit his website
• Read a related article: Workplace Approaches and Women’s Inequality: Embracing change is the future
• Discover ESSEC Business School France–Singapore–Morocco
• Apply for an ESSEC MBA or EMBA.

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