Echoes from the Past: The Impact of Racial Transference on Leader Selection during Succession

The dominant perspective used to understand racial bias in leader selection decisions is leader categorization theory (LCT). The received wisdom is twofold: evaluators prefer White leaders because they possess prototypical leader traits; however, during periods of decline, evaluators prefer racial minority leaders because their stereotypical traits (e.g., warmth) position them to galvanize followers. We argue that whereas LCT is useful for explaining racial bias in non-succession contexts, it is insufficient for explaining racial bias during succession. During succession, evaluators focus on the predecessor as the point of comparison when evaluating candidates. This causes stereotypes and prototypes to fade from evaluators' minds, only to be replaced by a different racial bias—racial transference—which occurs when evaluators falsely assume that a leader candidate has the same personality traits as a racially similar predecessor, and thus will perform similarly. Consequently, evaluators select (reject) candidates who are racially similar to successful (unsuccessful) predecessors. We find support for these predictions in an archival study, a pre-registered experiment, and three supplementary studies. Altogether, theory on racial transference establishes that racial bias during succession is driven by evaluators’ tendency to generalize between racially similar predecessors and candidates, even if such generalizations are inconsistent with prevailing stereotypes and prototypes.