Selection or Socialization? Role-Theoretic Mechanisms of Political Ideological Change in Top Management Teams

As societal attention to the political beliefs of business leaders has grown, the organization and management literature has evinced numerous differences in strategic decision-making attributable to executives’ ideologies. While the individual tendencies of liberals and conservatives provide a convincing mechanistic explanation within the upper echelons tradition, this perspective largely treats group-level ideological composition as static, overlooking the interpersonal processes through which ideological biases are generated and expressed within top management teams (TMT). Taking a novel role-theoretic approach, this study addresses these overlooked intraorganizational antecedents. We theorize and demonstrate that CEO partisanship increases ideological polarization and homogeneity in the TMT, proposing that CEOs with more extreme political views shape the ideological composition of their teams via two pathways. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, we find weak evidence for ideological homophily in executive selection. Rather, executives gradually shift towards the ideology of their CEO over their shared tenure, implying the dominance of a socialization mechanism based on interpersonal influence rather than structural power. A study of 823 U.S. firms over 21 years shows that these effects operate independently of the CEO’s political position but are intensified under liberal and female CEOs, further supporting an interactionist explanation. Complementary analyses of executive selection events and comparative trajectories of individuals’ political activity provide mechanistic evidence, and we identify temporal contingencies that reflect broader sociopolitical shifts. These findings contribute a processual explanation that extends causal understanding of how and why ideologically motivated decisions emerge from group contexts, with implications for theory, governance, and stakeholder management.