The executive who leaves isn't only the one who failed. In this study, retirement rose at both ends of firm performance.

You are planning next year's leadership bench, and you have sorted your senior people into two groups: the ones who are struggling and might leave, and the ones who are thriving and will stay. It is a tidy map. A paper published on October 20, 2026 in Personnel Psychology suggests it may be missing one of the exits.

The paper is "Leaving on a High or Low Note? An Achievement Goal Perspective on Executive Retirement," by Zhefan Huang (CUHK Business School, The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Kaidi Wang, Bingjie Lu, Aaron D. Hill and Christopher Pryor (all at the Warrington College of Business, University of Florida), and Mo Wang (Warrington College of Business, and the Freeman School of Business, Tulane University). One caution on how far I got: the full text sat behind a publisher block I could not get through, so everything here comes from the published abstract. I have not seen the tables, the effect sizes, or how retirement was defined.

What the abstract does tell us about method is this. The authors report two studies: an archival dataset of 1,840 chief executive officers at S&P 1500 firms (Study 1) and a two-wave survey of 363 executives (Study 2). They say they found "general support" for their theory. That is their phrase, and it is not the same as support for every prediction. The abstract does not say which parts held in which study, so I will not either.

The theory is the interesting part, and it is a theory, built on late-adulthood developmental psychology. In the authors' own words:

We theorize that firm performance is associated with two distinct mechanisms: the legacy fulfillment mechanism (salient for executives with high performance) and the selective prioritization mechanism (salient for executives with low performance), which together result in a U‐shaped relationship between firm performance and the likelihood of executive retirement.— Huang, Wang, Lu, Wang, Hill and Pryor, abstract, Personnel Psychology (October 2026)

Put plainly: the executives running strong firms may retire because they feel their legacy is secured, and the executives running weak firms may retire because they choose to spend their remaining effort elsewhere. The middle, where results are merely acceptable, is where the model predicts people are least likely to go. The abstract also says the authors examined executives' goal orientations as boundary conditions for the two mechanisms. It does not tell me what those moderators turned out to do, so I leave them alone.

Why this lands differently for the person at the top. Anyone can see a struggling executive's exit coming, because the performance numbers announce it. A strong executive's departure may not announce itself the same way, and this is my reading, not the paper's. The better the results, the more the people around that executive read contentment into them, and the less likely anyone is to ask directly about plans. The person at the top sits in the one seat that can ask, and also the one seat that tends to treat a strong performer's silence as a commitment. Do not assume the subject will be raised for you.

The part the research doesn't say, but that I'll say plainly: a U-shape in a dataset is a pattern across many executives, not a forecast for the one down the hall. I am also reasoning past an abstract. If the pattern holds, then a succession plan that only activates when performance slips is aimed at half the risk. And the two exits probably need different conversations: one about what a person wants their last chapter to mean, the other about whether the role is still the best use of their remaining effort. Those cautions and that inference are mine, not the authors'. Their abstract speaks of association and likelihood, and I would keep it at that.

One thing to do this week. Pick the two or three senior people whose results you would never worry about, and ask each one the same open question in a private conversation: what would you want the last stretch of your time here to accomplish? Do not frame it as a retirement question and do not treat the answer as a commitment in either direction. You are not trying to make anyone leave or stay. You are replacing an assumption with something you heard.

If you want a structured way to see how your own leadership team is wired before the next transition forces the question, that is what the Leadership Profile is for: /wiring-map.