The Demographic Metabolism of Organizations: Industry Dynamics, Turnover, and Tenure Distributions

Abstract

I thank the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University for their financial support. I greatly appreciate the research assistance of Joseph Broschak, Lisa Cohen, and Lynn Nonnemaker. I am grateful for the comments of Judith Blau, Joseph Broschak, Lisa Cohen, J. Richard Harrison, Charles O'Reilly, Jim Wade, and seminar participants at the University of Oregon, the University of Arizona, Harvard University, Cornell University, the University of Chicago, and Princeton University. Comments from Christine Oliver and three anonymous ASQ reviewers helped immensely in the revision of this paper. In this paper, I develop and test an ecological model of the antecedents of organizational demography, focusing on the aspect of organizational demography that has been linked most strongly to individual and organizational outcomes: tenure distributions. I propose that organizational ecology, the context within which organizations operate and the dynamics of that context, influences rates of organizational turnover and thereby affects organizations' tenure distributions. Organizational founding, dissolution, and merger drive employees into and out of firms, and this ecologically induced mobility will affect organizations' tenure distributions. Moreover, great size and age will buffer organizations from the turbulence caused by ecological processes. Analysis of organizations in one industry shows that ecological processes have strong, direct influences on managerial turnover and systematic indirect influences on the entry and exit of managers and the average tenure and tenure dispersions of management groups.'