Management scholars suggested that employing minority leaders, including CEOs, will further motivate firms to hire more minority job candidates. But empirical research examining the effect of minority leaders on hiring minority employees reported mixed results, further suggesting the need for careful investigation of the conditions under which minority leaders support minority job candidates. In this paper, I focus on foreign CEOs and argue that their firms will hire more foreign job candidates than will firms led by domestic CEOs. Building on social identity theory, I suggest that foreign CEOs will identify more strongly with foreign job candidates because, as they advanced to their position as CEO, they encountered substantial barriers and disadvantages caused by their foreigner status. This stronger identification will then lead them to shape their firms’ hiring policies to promote the hiring of foreign job candidates. Moreover, I argue that those foreign CEOs whose experienced a more challenging process to achieving their position, such as foreign CEOs stemming from lower-income countries, will also be more motivated to promote the hiring of foreigners. I carefully tested these ideas using German data on 9.157 independent firms across 18 industries between the years 1993 and 2014.
