In this study, we reacquaint management scholars with the corporate practice of sinecures, which are scarce, selectively apportioned, value-bearing, and duty-light role positions. We theorize that one reason racial discrimination in hiring and retention may perpetuate—despite legal and constitutional prohibitions against such discrimination—is that managers create, apportion, and maintain sinecures for persons of different races in accordance with the political ideological preferences of their firm’s owners. Using an institutionally-created position from the National Basketball Association—the “14th/15th player” slots that derive from requirements that all teams have no more than 15 players on their rosters but can only play 13 of them per game—we examine how political ideology of the team owner interacts with the race of players to yield preferential hiring/retention outcomes. Utilizing daily game data from NBA players from the 2000-2001 through 2019-2020 seasons, this study demonstrates that White players have a higher hazard of being acquired as “14th/15th players” and a lower hazard of being traded away by teams as the political ideology of the team owners grows more conservative. The converse holds for teams with liberal owners. Our study has implications for the literatures on racial discrimination and political ideology.
