Women executives and off‐the‐job misconduct by high‐profile employees: A study of National Football League team organizations

• Date: 01 November 2020
• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Author: Mary E. Graham,Bhavneet Walia,Chris Robinson
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2476

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Women executives and off-the-job misconduct by high-profile

employees: A study of National Football League team

organizations

Mary E. Graham

1

| Bhavneet Walia

1

| Chris Robinson

2

1

David B. Falk College of Sport and Human

Dynamics, Syracuse University, Syracuse,

New York, USA

2

Tulane Law School, Tulane University, New

Orleans, Louisiana, USA

Correspondence

Mary E. Graham, David B. Falk College of

Sport and Human Dynamics,

301 MacNaughton Hall, Syracuse University,

Syracuse, NY 13244, USA.

Email: megraham@syr.edu

Summary

The risk of off-the-job misconduct by high-profile employees is a serious concern of

top management in professional sport organizations, media and entertainment com-

panies, and public-facing entities in the government and education sectors. Yet there

is little research on how to prevent or mitigate this form of misconduct in organiza-

tions. Utilizing upper echelons theory and the literature on demographic composition,

we examine the relationship between the gender composition of executives of team

organizations in a men's professional sport league and subsequent misconduct by

players on those teams. Specifically, we employed multilevel and logistic regression

analyses to unique data on U.S. National Football League team organizations, and we

found that firms with a critical mass of women executives experienced fewer player

arrests. No support was found for executive power as a moderator of this relation-

ship. We discuss the implications of our findings for the demographic composition lit-

erature. We also offer guidance for preventing and managing off-the-job misconduct

by high-profile employees.

KEYWORDS

critical mass theory, employee misconduct, top management team diversity, upper echelons

theory

1|INTRODUCTION

Organizations and managers have a clear interest in avoiding the

financial and reputational harm associated with employee misconduct,

which is voluntary misbehavior, unethical activity, and hostile behav-

ior that deviates from prevailing norms (Robinson & Bennett, 1995;

Werbel & Balkin, 2010). When employees are public figures, as is the

case with professional athletes, they are often expected to conduct

themselves ethically both at work and outside of work, and the nega-

tive consequences of misconduct may be severe. For example, the

arrests of National Football League (NFL) players have generated neg-

ative publicity, sponsorship withdrawals, and reductions in team mer-

chandise sales (Belson, 2014).

Studies on employee misconduct identify a number of

organization-level factors that help prevent, limit, or redress employee

wrongdoing, including strong organizational cultures and ethical cli-

mates for decision making (Andreoli & Lefkowitz, 2008; Mayer,

Kuenzi, & Greenbaum, 2010). However, no studies on misconduct

have tapped into the substantial literature on the firm-level benefits

of gender diverse management teams, which may in fact be anteced-

ents of these conditions. In our paper, we argue that the gender diver-

sity of organizations' executive ranks has the potential to shape

organization-level culture and strategic decision making in ways that

could influence employee conduct.

Our study context is team organizations in the National Football

League (NFL), which has struggled to reduce player misbehavior off

the field. To illustrate, a 2007 NFL player conduct policy change

failed to reduce off-the-job arrests among players who spanned

pre-policy and post-policy implementation (Lyons, Hoffman,

Bommer, Kennedy, & Hetrick, 2016). And domestic violence

Received: 13 March 2019 Revised: 23 July 2020 Accepted: 25 July 2020

DOI: 10.1002/job.2476

J Organ Behav. 2020;41:815–829. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 815