UPDATED: February 27, 2023
Originally published in the inaugural edition of 卡罗尔的资本, the print publication of the 卡罗尔学校 of Management at 电子游戏软件. 点击这里阅读全文.
近年来, many Americans have nurtured the art of tiptoeing around politically sensitive topics when gathering with family and socializing with friends, or they’ve taken the opposite tack of hurdling into the fray. They’ve practiced these diplomatic or polemical arts in their private lives, though probably not as much in the workplace: By most accounts, the atmosphere at work has been less charged politically for most people. 但这种情况也在改变.
在一个 recent survey by the 社会 for Human Resource Management, nearly half of employees reported that they had either been involved in political disagreements at work or had witnessed such arguments. And research from the 卡罗尔学校 has revealed that these tensions are escalating even more dramatically in corporate boardrooms.
You’d think that if any groups of professionals were inclined to put profits above politics, it would be the executive teams of major corporations. That, however, is not what 卡罗尔学校 金融 Professor 维亚切斯拉夫(斯拉夫)福斯 and two colleagues have discovered in their research on political polarization in the C-suites.
“We always thought that money comes first—that top executives leave their political views at home,福斯说。, speaking of past assumptions by researchers. “But no—people take into account the political views of their peers when deciding to join the team, 什么时候离开, 甚至该解雇谁.”
The key finding: Executive teams are becoming more likeminded as executives depart because they don’t align with the team’s political majority. 此外, the research cuts finely enough to show that in case after case, such a departure adversely affects the market value of a firm.
Fos and collaborators—Harvard’s Elisabeth Kempf and Cornell’s Margarita Tsoutsoura—have been able to uncover hidden dynamics in boardrooms by culling through 12 years of voter registration records, cross-checking with public disclosures about executives at 1,500强企业. Their paper, originally published online by the National Bureau of Economic 电子游戏正规平台, is under revision at a top journal; the findings will be presented in April at the Bureau's spring meeting in Chicago.
“We always thought that money comes first—that top executives leave their political views at home. But no—people take into account the political views of their peers when deciding to join the team, 什么时候离开, 甚至该解雇谁. ”
Executive teams are “increasingly partisan,学者们写道, defining partisanship as “the degree to which a single party dominates political views within the same executive team.” They cite two factors: Republicans constitute a growing share of executive teams at the 1,500 firms (which rattles the familiar narrative that companies are becoming “woke”); and top executives, 共和党还是民主党, are “matching” with peers of their own party.
Such partisanship is “value destroying for shareholders,教授们说, who tracked stock prices following departures of executive team members. They studied two groups: departing executives who aligned with the political majority on their teams, 还有那些没有的人. Over two trading sessions, the average return on stocks was 1.7 percent lower for the second group of politically “misaligned” executives who departed (a statistically significant difference for such a short period). Investors are often able to sniff out the reasons for these departures or at least know something is awry when someone leaves abruptly.
The market frowns upon boardroom partisanship. The flip side is that politically diverse executive teams are good for a firm’s value and rewarded by investors. But don’t bet on an upswing of bipartisanship as the country lurches toward another presidential election.
