Does it (re)pay to be female? Considering gender in microfinance loan officer-client pairs

This paper examines the effect of the gender combination of client-loan officer pairs on loan repayment in an Ecuadorian microfinance institution. We show that among the four possible client-loan officer gender pairs i.e. female client-female loan officer, female client-male loan officer, male client-male loan officer and male client-female loan officer, the most favourable pairs in terms of repayment are those with female loan officers whereas the least favourable are those with male loan officers. We also show that repayment is even further enhanced for all client-loan officer pairs when the client’s previous loan officer was a woman. Our findings point to relational differences between m…

Do Female Loan Officers Mitigate Social-Financial Trade-Offs in Microfinance?

This paper revisits social-financial trade-offs in microfinance. We theorize that workforce diversity mitigates the divergence between social and financial performance levels. We test our prediction by performing fixed-effects generalised least squares regressions on a global sample of 1257 microfinance institutions (MFIs) in 107 countries over the period 2010–2018. Confirming our prediction, the empirical results show that the proportion of female loan officers attenuates the negative relationship between the social performance and the financial performance of MFIs. We attribute our findings to the personal characteristics of female loan officers and the high repayment rates of loans that …

Human Resources and Performance in Social Enterprises : Evidence from Microfinance Institutions

Should microfinance institutions hire staff from the same socioeconomic status as their clients?

Master's thesis Business Administration BE501 - University of Agder 2017 Firms require staff to perform their operations. As such, the staff are considered an important resource in the achievement of any firm’s objectives. This is particularly the case with firms whose activities require staff to establish relationships with their clients. Such firms face even greater pressure in ensuring that objectives are achieved owing to behavioural differences of individual staff across social dimensions such as gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and age. Following this, some human resource studies advocate for the matching of staff with potential clients to produce positive performance outcomes.…

Employee tenure and staff performance: The case of a social enterprise

Abstract The literature on social enterprises has largely examined tradeoffs at the organizational level. In this study, we examine tradeoffs at the employee level. By analyzing the case of an Ecuadorian microfinance institution, we show that the tenure of social enterprise employees affects individual social and financial performance differently: the relationship between tenure and social performance is positive, whereas the relationship between tenure and financial performance is an inverted U-shape. Furthermore, our results suggest that social enterprise employees with the longest tenure are the least inclined to experience tradeoff tensions.