Agency, Interrupted: Does Organizational Restructuring Improve Managerial Gender Parity? Testing a Disruption Hypothesis

ABSTRACT Administrative restructuring is an organizational phenomenon suggested to improve under‐represented groups' managerial representation by disrupting networks and institutions. However, extant tests of a ‘disruption hypothesis’ are collectively inconclusive. We elaborate and test it with a qualitative‐to‐quantitative study of local health agency managers and mergers across the Italian NHS from 2014 to 2020. Agency leader interviews reveal disruption indicators: number of agencies merging, staff rationalization, changes in geographical scale, and agency heterogeneity. Using administrative data, we find disruption measures have some positive associations with women's share of management, post‐merger retention, and new hires, providing modest support for the disruption hypothesis. However, there is an unexpected ‘winners‐and‐losers’ dynamic: incumbent women had higher post‐merger attrition than men, but merged agencies hired more women than non‐merging agencies. We offer three abductively developed interpretations of this finding, extending the disruption hypothesis' connections with public management theory on the informal, organizational antecedents of diversity in senior management.