Leaving the Pilot Seat Empty: Determinants of Vacancy Instances in Top Executive Positions
After a chief executive departs, organizations occasionally leave the position empty or name an interim for some time. Recent research shows that the occurrence and length of vacancy instances among organizations varies widely. Interim leaders often face critical situations amid complex environments with restricted decision-making power which can have important implications for organizational performance. Executive vacancies are salient in contemporary organizations but have yet to be carefully addressed by research in public management. This paper explores the variability of executive vacancy, focusing on organizational characteristics of size, performance, sector, and anticipation of departure as key explanatory variables. To test our hypotheses, we use data from public and private U.S. doctoral universities to identify 230 leadership transitions between 1993 and 2013. We find that anticipation of a departure is an extremely strong predictor of vacancy. Additionally, private universities are significantly less likely to experience vacancy, but organizational performance and size do not appear to matter.
Bello-Gomez, R.A. and Rutherford, A. Leaving the Pilot Seat Empty: Determinants of Vacancy Instances in Top Executive Positions. Invitation to revise and resubmit at Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory.