When organizations deviate: Leadership selection surprises and performance consequences

This study examines how “surprising leaders,” defined as leadership appointments that deviate from conventional succession expectations, affect organizational performance. Leadership selection decisions are often made by a small group of decision makers and may rely on intuition, personal networks, or perceived fit rather than observable credentials. As a result, organizations may select leaders who deviate from conventional expectations, yet we know little about whether these atypical hiring decisions improve or harm organizational performance. Using the National Football League as a transparent and data-rich setting, this study constructs a panel dataset of coaching careers and applies logit and linear regression models to identify surprise leaders to test how these hires influence subsequent performance. Ultimately, I find that more surprising head coach hires are associated with worse team performance. Specifically, more surprising leaders are associated with lower team win percentage in one season following the succession event and weaker composite performance over longer horizons. These findings suggest that deviations from conventional hiring patterns introduce risk that, on average, results in lower performance rather than upside.