When and Why Do New Leaders Get Endorsed? The Role of Gender and Tenure in Leadership Succession

Leadership succession is a frequent and inevitable occurrence in organizations. Yet, scholarly understanding of succession beyond the CEO-level is strikingly limited. We join a small but growing stream of literature on leadership succession at the team level and investigate the joint impact of new leader gender, prior leader gender and new leader organizational tenure on followers’ endorsement of the new leader compared to that of the prior leader. Building on role congruity theory and contrast effect theory, we postulate that gender bias is exacerbated when there is a leader gender change. Moreover, we argue that when new leaders have high organizational tenure this conveys status and allows followers to fall back on person-specific information. Using archival data from a large multinational consumer goods company we find that, contrary to expectations, new leader gender and prior leader gender do not jointly predict new leader endorsement. In line with expectations, new leader gender, prior leader gender, and new leader tenure jointly predict new leader endorsement, such that tenure impacts the endorsement of new leaders succeeding a female, but not a male leader. We discuss implications for theory on leadership succession and gender and leadership.