When Are Minority Executives Fired? Examining Four Factors Using Sport Coaches and Survival Analysis

Society’s motivation to eliminate racial and ethnic disparities has directed attention towards many areas, including executive leadership. Prior studies examining the dismissal of minority executives offer equivocal findings – likely because prior research has not examined whether organizational and strategic factors have different effects on White and non-White executives’ dismissal. To address this, we develop a sample of college basketball coaches over 17 years as a proxy for executives and utilize Cox Proportional Hazard models to analyze the relationships of four factors with White and non-White coach dismissal. Our findings provide new insights regarding dismissal for executives of color. First, executives of color who lead organizations with less investment or weaker competitive peers are more likely to be dismissed than their White counterparts. Second, executives of color with little or no prestige developed during their tenure are more likely to be dismissed than White executives with similarly low levels of prestige. Lastly, strategic change is associated with a greater likelihood of executives of color being dismissed, but a decreased likelihood of dismissal for White executives. These findings provide further support for glass ceiling and glass cliff explanations of dismissal, but also suggest potential institutional explanations of minority executive dismissal.