Say a director is posted from one country office to another for a three year assignment and takes over a team of about eight people. No memo arrives about how to run the team, because the company already has policies for pay and promotion, and the director follows them. When the assignment ends the director moves on to the next one, and the policies are still in place for whoever comes after. Something else has stayed behind as well.

A company with the same policies in every office

Four economists, Virginia Minni, Kieu-Trang Nguyen, Heather Sarsons and Carla Srebot, studied exactly this situation in a working paper the National Bureau of Economic Research issued in January, which has not been through peer review. They worked from monthly personnel records at a consumer goods multinational headquartered in Europe with operations in more than 100 countries, covering 2011 to 2021, with pay data from 2016.1 Their sample was 909 male expatriate managers at director or vice president level and above, each of whom moved to an office abroad and took over a team that averaged about eight people.1

The authors could not interview every manager about what he believes, so they estimated the attitudes each one would have absorbed growing up, using World Values Survey answers averaged by home country and birth cohort.1 That makes the measure an estimate of inherited defaults, and it says nothing certain about any single person. Every team in the study received an expatriate. The comparison was between women on teams whose new manager sat further toward the progressive end of that scale and women on teams whose new manager sat further from it.1

About half of it ran through promotions

For each standard step toward the progressive end, which the authors illustrate as roughly the distance between an American and a Chinese manager born in the 1980s, the pay gap between women and men came out about five percentage points narrower than on the comparison teams. The paper puts that at about a sixth of a baseline gap near 28 percent.1 Women were also 4.8 percentage points more likely to be promoted to a higher work level, and the authors attribute roughly half of the pay effect to promotions.1 A compensation policy does not say when a promotion must happen. Somebody has to put a name forward, and whose name goes up is a judgment call that every policy leaves open.

The promotion list is the record of what a manager did with the room the policy left open.

After the manager rotated out

The narrower gap among those workers held after the manager left, and it was largest in offices with more traditional gender norms.1 My read of why is that a promotion is a durable decision. The person promoted keeps the title when the manager leaves and is in the room when the next promotions are discussed, so one manager's default turns into staffing, and staffing supplies the judgment for the decisions that follow. The authors point the same way, naming more women in managerial jobs as the likely reason the effect lasted.1

It also traveled sideways. Local managers who worked alongside the expatriate without reporting to him, and his own direct reports who ran teams of their own, later had smaller pay gaps on those teams too, at roughly half the size of the direct effect.1

This is one company over one decade, and the attitude measure is a proxy, so I would not stretch it into a rule about any particular country or person. The study also found no sign of harm when the arriving manager was less egalitarian than the local office, so it offers no evidence that damage travels the same road.1 What it points to is a path a policy review will never examine, where a discretionary decision repeated over a few years changes who is in the room afterward. I wrote earlier about how an organization behaves after a leader change, and this question is narrower, about what physically remains on a team once the leader has gone.

What a leader transfer carries

Companies move leaders for sound reasons, to develop them or to steady an office after an acquisition, and few of them track what each move carries in, because the cargo appears on no form. A values statement describes the culture a company intends, and the promotion record is where you find out how close it came.

You do not need a survey index to find out what is in your own record. Before a senior transfer or an acquisition integration, read the promotion and stretch assignment history of the leader's previous team. Two years afterward, read the new team's. I would bet that those two documents tell you more about the culture you are importing than the values statement does, and both already exist in your HR system.

Which decisions in your organization does policy leave to discretion, and whose defaults have been filling them?