Firm Performance, Senior Management, and Managerial Representation
Description
While my work on strategic human capital studies how the characteristics of management shape performance, this work in effect focuses on the reverse: how performance shapes a key characteristic of the firm's management
Working with Professor David Thomas, we are using the NFL coaching staff data to explore how a firm's performance shapes its choices in hiring managers from under-represented groups, and how the presence of minorities in top management positions influences hiring at the middle and lower levels of the firm. The NFL data offers a unique opportunity to examine these questions. In our first paper, we find that better-performing teams are less likely to hire minorities to fill lower-level and mid-level coaching positions (as predicted by prior literature on labor queues), but that such teams are more likely to hire minorities into leadership positions. We also find that minority head coaches hire more minorities for subordinate coaching jobs, but that the presence of a minority offensive or defensive coordinator (with a white head coach) is a significant, negative predictor of minority hiring in junior and mid-level positions.
We are also working on the following:
- A paper integrating player data into our analysis, exploring how managerial composition affects the racial composition of the team, and the differential impact of minority coaches on player performance.
- A paper examining the career paths of minority coaches, using a matching methodology.