How Quickly Do Catholic Bishops Become Obsolete?

• Published date: 01 March 2015
• Date: 01 March 2015
• Author: Charles Zech
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21127

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N M  L, vol. 25, no. 3, Spring 2015 © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/nml.21127

Journal sponsored by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University.

Correspondence to: Charles Zech, Villanova University, Economics Department, 800 Lancaster Avenue, Villanova, PA

19085. E-mail: Charles.zech@villanova.edu.

How Quickly Do Catholic Bishops

Become Obsolete?

BISHOP TENURE AND DIOCESAN PERFORMANCE

Charles Zech

Villanova University

A well-developed management literature exists that argues that new corporate chief executive

officers’ performance initially increases, but for a variety of reasons it eventually peaks and

then decreases; this pattern of performance is graphically depicted as an inverted U-shaped

form. The explanation is that although there might exist an appropriate match between

the CEO and the organization’s needs at the time of appointment, a CEO’s effectiveness

will diminish because of factors such as a leveling off in learning on the part of the CEO; a

reluctance on the part of CEOs to change their management style; an increased reliance on

fewer, primarily internal, advisors; and the tendency for these advisors to provide CEOs only

with the type of information that they want to hear. All of this is compounded by a dynamic

external environment.

This article applies this theory to the case of US Catholic bishops in an effort to discover

whether they might follow the same pattern in leading their dioceses. Using the number of

seminarians recruited as a performance measure, a pooled data set was tested for the exist-

ence of an inverted U-shaped pattern. Instead, the findings show a monotonically decreas-

ing impact on performance as bishop tenure increases. One possible explanation is a poor

initial match between a bishop’s talents and the diocese’s needs.

Keywords: chief executive officer, external environment, information filtering, learning,

organizational performance

SCHOLARS STUDYING ORGANIZATIONS have for some time recognized a relationship

between the tenure of the organization’s chief executive officer (CEO) and the organiza-

tion’s performance.  e relationship is typically depicted as an upside-down U-shape.  at

is, organizational performance initially increases upon the appointment of a new CEO, but

later peaks and eventually decreases during the latter years of the CEO’s tenure.  is pattern

has been demonstrated for such diverse positions as college basketball coaches (team perfor-

mance declines after thirteen years) (Eitzen and Yetman 1972); CEOs of fi lm studios (perfor-

mance decreases after ten years) (Miller and Shamsie 2001); and the branded foods industry

(Henderson, Miller, and Hambrick 2006). Wu, Levitas, and Priem (2005) demonstrated the