Top Management Team Characteristics and Skilled Migrant Hiring in the Conservative Political Climate

Corporate elites are expected to be favourable towards skilled migrant hiring due to their comfort with the profit motive. Theoretical and empirical evidence, on the other hand, shows that employers engage in discriminatory hiring practices against foreign workers due to their personal biases and preferences. As the level of macro-political conservatism increases, it is important to further explore the relevance and importance of corporate leaders’ political ideology with regard to skilled migrant hiring. We investigate the impact of top management teams’ ideology on skilled migrant hiring, moderated by their international work experience and a macro-political shift. Using a dataset of S&P 1500 firms and their H-1B visa sponsorships between 2009 and 2021, we find that top management teams’ political conservatism negatively affects skilled migrant hiring. Such a negative impact is positively moderated by top management teams’ international work experience and negatively by a conservative national political climate. This paper contributes to the upper echelons literature by examining how top management team characteristics interfere with important managerial actions such as hiring in response to macro-environmental changes.