The burden of being atypical: The impact of (A)typicality in leader profiles on organizational reputation

Despite growing interest in appointing top leaders with atypical biographical profiles, many organizations follow typical expectations of what a leader’s profile looks like and avoid deviations from such expectations. This article aims to answer why such changes to leadership atypicality can be difficult by examining a major disadvantage of atypical leader profiles—organizational reputational penalties. Drawing on institutional theory and leadership categorization theory, we propose that atypical components in a leader’s profile are met with greater skepticism and scrutiny of leadership capability from external stakeholders, thereby leading to reputation losses. We examine this argument by developing and testing hypotheses on the reputational impact of atypicality in deans’ profiles in American law schools from 1998 to 2016. Our results show that atypical attributes of a leader’s profile are negatively associated with organizational reputation across a broad spectrum of deans’ key profile attributes, including their career path, education credentials, and gender minorities. We discuss the implications of these findings for the study of organizational atypicality and reputation.