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Women executives and off‐the‐job misconduct by high‐profile employees: A study of National Football League team organizations
Author(s) -
Graham Mary E.,
Walia Bhavneet,
Robinson Chris
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
journal of organizational behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.938
H-Index - 177
eISSN - 1099-1379
pISSN - 0894-3796
DOI - 10.1002/job.2476
Subject(s) - misconduct , league , moderation , football , public relations , government (linguistics) , psychology , business , political science , social psychology , linguistics , philosophy , physics , astronomy , law
Summary The risk of off‐the‐job misconduct by high‐profile employees is a serious concern of top management in professional sport organizations, media and entertainment companies, and public‐facing entities in the government and education sectors. Yet there is little research on how to prevent or mitigate this form of misconduct in organizations. Utilizing upper echelons theory and the literature on demographic composition, we examine the relationship between the gender composition of executives of team organizations in a men's professional sport league and subsequent misconduct by players on those teams. Specifically, we employed multilevel and logistic regression analyses to unique data on U.S. National Football League team organizations, and we found that firms with a critical mass of women executives experienced fewer player arrests. No support was found for executive power as a moderator of this relationship. We discuss the implications of our findings for the demographic composition literature. We also offer guidance for preventing and managing off‐the‐job misconduct by high‐profile employees.