Cio survival and the Composition of the Top Management Team

We explore empirical regularities of CIO survivability in public and private organizations using CIO job tenure durations spanning 1994 to 2009 for 1,594 executives. We employ the Kaplan-Meier estimator from event history analysis to compute survivor functions for CEOs, COOs, CFOs and CIOs. We make log rank comparisons of job tenure durations to make inferences within/across executive titles, and between public and private sector groups. The results suggest that: CIOs have shorter survival durations than CEOs and COOs, comparable to CFOs; private sector CIOs have longer durations than public sector CIOs; CIO membership in the top management team increases survivability; female CIOs stay a shorter time than males; and women on the top management team diminish CIO tenures overall. From an additional executive arrival and departure time proximity analysis, we find that only a quarter of CIOs are members of the top management team, but membership lengthens tenure.