Other Than the Racism, I Liked the City: The Role of Ideology in Organizational Hiring

Abstract

While there is research on the effect of ideology on organizational hiring, much of that research treats this interaction as a uniform response at the broad organizational level stemming from ideological actions. By treating ideology as a construct that is equally salient across all situations, rather than examining in which situations it is most salient and the role of ideological asymmetries, management scholars miss important organizational insights. One such example of ideological asymmetry is the hiring and retention of a marginal employee in an organization, in which performance criteria are less important than supervisor discretion. This paper demonstrates that teams owned by Republican NBA owners will hire marginal white players over and beyond what performance differences would suggest. This has important implications for organizational scholars, since these hiring differences cannot be resolved through market forces if it is owners themselves that have such an outsized effect.