Political context and immigrants’ work-related performance errors: Insights from the National Basketball Association

Abstract

In numerous countries, both international migration and regional support for far-right political parties are on the rise. This is important considering that a frequent aim of far-right political parties is to aggressively limit the inflow of immigrants. Understanding how regional far-right political support affects the immigrants working in these regions is therefore vital for executives and organizations as a whole. Integrating political science research at the macro-level with stereotype threat theory at the individual level, we argue that regional far-right political support makes negative immigrant stereotypes salient, increasing the number of work-related performance errors conducted by immigrants while reducing those by natives. Using objective field data from a professional sports context, we demonstrate how subordinates’ immigrant status interacts with the political context in which they reside to predict their frequency of performance errors.