Park & Westphal (2013).Social Discrimination in the Corporate Elite: How Status Affects the Propensity for Minority CEOs to Receive Blame for Low Firm Performance

Question 1. 1. Your study investigates social discrimination in the attributions made by top managers about the performance of other firms with minority CEOs in their communications with journalists. Specifically, you focus attention on the use of internal attributions to explain low performance of the minority CEO’s firm. Do you think that the same theoretical framework could be applied to explain external attributions of high performance of the minority CEO’s firm?

Yes, the framework could explain external attributions for high performance. Our only caveat would be that such attributions may have less influence on journalist reporting. We believe that internal attributions for low performance have a particularly strong influence on journalist reports, in part because journalists especially look for credible experts to validate negative coverage of firm leadership.

Question 2. 2. Given the complexity of social discrimination issues as well as attributional processes, how did you settle on initial empirical and theoretical ideas for this paper? In what ways did you have to revise your focus as the research progressed?

Our theoretical framework draws on ideas from attribution theory and intergroup relations that are core to social psychology, and there was considerable evidence for the importance of these processes within boards, top management teams and CEO/board relationships. So we suspected that these fundamental processes could also influence evaluations of CEOs at other firms, especially given the salience of CEO minority status. However, the moderating influence of journalist characteristics was stronger than expected, and perhaps the biggest surprise in the study. We found that female or racial minority journalists are less likely to be persuaded by white male CEO’s internal attribution for the low firm performance of minority CEOs and thus less likely to issue negative statements about the CEO’s leadership. This was an important finding for us because it suggests that the social categorization process implicated in the CEO reputation construction involves not only the CEOs themselves, but also the journalists whom we often consider impartial social arbiters.

Question 3. 3. What difficulties did you come across while working on this research project? How did you overcome them?

Surveys are obviously a huge amount of work, and they often fail. You have to hedge by developing archival measures to the extent possible. But when the survey works and you start receiving responses, it’s very exciting and rewarding.

Question 4. 4. Could you share some of your personal experience and insights on how to develop a coherent stream of research and build a distinctive identity as a scholar?

It’s important to have depth of knowledge in a theoretical discipline or sub-discipline that is distinct from that of your fellow scholars, and to marry that with direct experience with the phenomenon, and/or preliminary qualitative research.