How Quickly Do Catholic Bishops Become Obsolete?

A well‐developed management literature exists that argues that new corporate chief executive officers’ performance initially increases, but for a variety of reasons it eventually peaks and then decreases; this pattern of performance is graphically depicted as an inverted U‐shaped form. The explanation is that although there might exist an appropriate match between the CEO and the organization's needs at the time of appointment, a CEO ’s effectiveness will diminish because of factors such as a leveling off in learning on the part of the CEO ; a reluctance on the part of CEOs to change their management style; an increased reliance on fewer, primarily internal, advisors; and the tendency for these advisors to provide CEOs only with the type of information that they want to hear. All of this is compounded by a dynamic external environment. This article applies this theory to the case of US Catholic bishops in an effort to discover whether they might follow the same pattern in leading their dioceses. Using the number of seminarians recruited as a performance measure, a pooled data set was tested for the existence of an inverted U‐shaped pattern. Instead, the findings show a monotonically decreasing impact on performance as bishop tenure increases. One possible explanation is a poor initial match between a bishop's talents and the diocese's needs.