Who will fit in? The impacts of outside CEO successors’ prior experience with board diversity

Research on boards suggests that the degree of demographic diversity among directors is a primary board feature that influences how directors monitor and advise the CEO. We draw from upper echelon theory to propose that a relatively diverse/homogeneous board may try to reduce post-succession conflicts with an outside CEO by selecting a successor who has prior experience as a director on other relatively diverse/homogeneous boards. Moreover, we...