This dissertation advances a social stratification perspective to identify and examine the antecedents of director turnover in different coalition backgrounds. While strategic leadership scholars have proposed multiple antecedents across different levels to explain the turnover of board directors, this has overlooked two critical issues. First, relatively little attention has been paid to the individual motivation to leave a focal board of members that belong to different coalitions. Directors of different coalitions within firms with divergent interests may leave for different motivational reasons, potentially suggesting different mechanisms and boundary conditions. Second, the literature has not fully examined how positions of power and status within a board affect director turnover in different coalitions. Given that power and status hierarchy involve allocation of resources and order of command, and also generate inequality that may affect individuals’ perceptions and motivations, such an examination is long overdue. In this dissertation, in the context of family firms, I develop two sets of arguments in the two chapters. First, drawing upon system justification theory, I argue that power differences between family and non-family directors cause non-family directors to involve themselves in hierarchy legitimation in order to reduce epistemic uncertainty and to engage in outgroup favoritism, acquiring resources. Non-family directors are thus less likely to leave. In addition, the second chapter draws on status literature and examines status differentials in the corporate field between non-family and family