TOP EXECUTIVE COMMITMENT TO THE STATUS-QUO - SOME TESTS OF ITS DETERMINANTS

Some top executives are more committed to the status quo-particularly to their organization's current strategy and leadership profile-than are others. Most empirical research on upper echelons treats psychological phenomena as a 'black box'-the unobserved intervening mechanisms-that causes associations between more observable executive characteristics and organizational outcomes. In contrast, this paper attempts to directly examine the determinants of an important element of an executive's psychological orientation-commitment to the status quo (CSQ). We focus on a select set of variables which have been posited in prior research as determinants of executive CSQ, but which have not been directly tested for such a relationship. Based on a large-scale survey methodology, results suggest that an executive's tenure in an industry is a pronounced determinant of CSQ, and has significantly more impact than organizational tenure. As expected, the firm's current performance was found to be positively related to CSQ; this relationship was stronger in high-discretion than in low-discretion industries. Finally, the project reaffirms a well known human tendency: incumbent CEOs tend to believe that their eventual successors should be just like them.