Organizational Demography and Turnover in Top-Management Group

W. Gary Wagner, Jeffrey Pfeffer, and Charles A. O'Reilly, Ill This study examines turnoverfrom 1976 to 1980 for 599 top-management group members in a sample of 31 Fortune 500 companies. A measure of demographic distance was defined on the basis of both age and date-of-entry similarity. The proportion of the top-management group turning over was inversely related to the firm's financial performance and positively related to the coefficient of variation of the distance among managers. At the individual level of analysis, managers who were older, were in firms that performed worse, and were more dissimilar in terms of age were more likely to turn over. The results suggest that it may be possible both to predict and manage turnover by considering the compositional characteristics of groups.