Shedding light on the CMO revolving door: a study of the antecedents of Chief Marketing Officer turnover

Pravin Nath () and Vijay Mahajan ()
Additional contact information
Pravin Nath: The University of Oklahoma
Vijay Mahajan: University of Texas at Austin

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 2017, vol. 45, issue 1, No 8, 93-118

Abstract: Abstract Investigating Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) tenure through a longitudinal study of the antecedents of CMO turnover, the authors find that CMO turnover increases if firms’ sales growth is poor, while profitability has a similar though smaller effect when a new CEO is appointed, highlighting marketing’s contextual role vis-à-vis performance metrics. Coupled with other results related to industry sales growth and stability that make CMO turnover less likely, these findings underscore marketing’s demand- or customer-facing role in the firm. The authors also show that some of these results are distinct to turnover among CMOs compared to other top management team (TMT) executives. While this research does show support for extant theory, its focus on the CMO within the TMT results in important contributions to the turnover literature. These include the inverted-U effect of TMT marketing experience on CMO turnover and the nuanced attenuation by CMO insider-ness of a similar relationship between CMO tenure and turnover. Overall, the results lead to important practical implications for managing CMO turnover.

Keywords: CMO; TMT; Tenure; Turnover; Exit; Departure; Quit; Leave; Stay; Terminate; Marketing experience; Marketing background; Performance; Growth; Sales; Profit; Industry; Instability; Organizational adaptation; Managerial capital; Sociopolitical; Scapegoat; CEO; Appointment; Succession (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11747-016-0478-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:joamsc:v:45:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s11747-016-0478-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer ... gement/journal/11747

DOI: 10.1007/s11747-016-0478-5

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science is currently edited by John Hulland, Anne Hoekman and Mark Houston

More articles in Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().