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The purpose of this paper is to attempt to verify the predicted relationship between the demographic (i.e. tenure, functional background, etc.) difference and cognitive difference among top managers and examine how such a relationship is affected by the communication among top managers.

The authors hypothesized that there is a positive relationship between demographic deviation and cognitive deviation of a focal manager on a TMT, and that such a relationship is mediated by the degree of communication that the focal manager has with other team members on the TMT. Using Structural Equation Modeling techniques, these hypotheses were tested based on a sample of 348 top managers that consist of 28 top management teams.

It was found that the hypothesized relationship between demographic deviation and cognitive deviation of a focal top manager was supported with respect to the tenure of a manager, but not the functional background of a manager. Moreover, it was found that communication frequency of a focal manager with other team members mediated the relationship between the tenure deviation and the cognitive deviation of the focal manager and that tenure deviation negatively influenced communication frequency, which in turn, negatively influenced the cognitive deviation of the manager.

These findings imply that: when constructing a competitive top management, practitioners such as boards of directors of a firm should pay more attention to the tenure diversity of a top management team because tenure diversity influences the cognitive diversity of the team; and communication among members of a management team can reduce the cognitive differences among members. However, communication happens more frequently among managers with similar tenure than among managers with dissimilar tenure. To promote consensus, managers need to watch for the forming of group fault lines along tenure within their teams.

As far as is known, this is the first study that uses relational demography to examine the influence of tenure difference on cognitive difference among members of a top management team and to expose a mediating role played by communication frequency.

The purpose of this study is to test a contingency model in which the relationship between task conflict and team performance depends on the extent to which team members differ in their levels of expertise and functional backgrounds.

Data were obtained from 71 student teams that completed a semester-long entrepreneurial project.

The results support the moderating role of expertise disparity in the process through which task conflict contributes to team performance. Task conflict had a curvilinear effect (inverted-U) on team performance in teams with high expertise disparity. In contrast, in teams with low expertise disparity, the relationship between task conflict and team performance was found to be linear and positive. The moderating role of functional background diversity was not supported.

This paper shows that the relationship between task conflict and team performance can exist in both a linear and a curvilinear fashion, and that what determines the form of the relationship has to do with a team’s diversity characteristics. The focus of future conflict research should be whether and how teams can realize the possible beneficial effects of task conflict, not whether task conflict is simply good or bad.

Managers may deliberately consider the differences in expertness among members when creating teams or assigning members to a team. Further, they may want to avoid extensive task conflict when a team’s expertise levels are unevenly distributed to lessen expected performance loss.

This study’s examination of the roles of two moderators in catalyzing the processes through which potential effects of task conflict are realized enhances the understanding of equivocal results in conflict research. The empirical evidence that this study provides informs a long-standing debate in the conflict literature – whether task conflict is functional or dysfunctional for teams – in a new, insightful way.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the influence of different aspects of top management team (TMT) functional background on short-term performance, long-term performance, innovation performance and oversea performance separately. This research aims to verify whether the social categorization theory and information and decision-making theory are applicable in listed companies of China’s information technology (IT) industry so as to provide key theoretical references for TMT enhancement ad corporate performance improvement.

This paper takes A-share listed companies in Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange as its study subjects, and it chooses the data from 2004 to 2010 in all of the 105 companies in IT industry in terms of the classification of Wind Database. The stepwise multiple regressions were run utilizing the regression program in Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS).

The research results show that the social categorization theory can better explain TMT’s influence on corporate performance. TMT functional heterogeneity does not contribute to improving corporate performance and shows significant negative influence on short-term performance and innovation performance in particular. Among the three basic functional backgrounds, TMTs dominated by “throughput” backgrounds show significant positive influence on short-term performance, long-term performance, innovation performance and overseas performance, and the influence turns out to be the largest among these three backgrounds. In terms of the three special professional experiences, top executives with overseas backgrounds have significant positive influence on all of short-term, long-term, innovation and overseas performances. Externally hired executives, however, would impede corporate innovation development, while those with government background would increase corporate overseas performance.

This paper analyzes the relationship between TMT functional background and corporate performance in a comprehensive way for the first time and then takes the lead in considering the dynamics and complexity of corporate performance as well as discussing the influence of TMT functional background on four corporate performances. This study not only supports the effect that the social categorization theory has on TMTs but also offers some inspirations on the development of China’s IT companies.

Means, medians and SD for available socio‐economic status (SES) black‐white differences are here substituted for those of IQ in a between‐groups model published by the author over a decade ago. The goodness of fit of the SES variables used is compared with that for the earlier IQ data. Even when SES variables are relatively successful this can be viewed as additional evidence of the importance of IQ differences to black‐white differences in delinquency.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of boards’ demographic diversity on firms’ strategic change and the interaction effect of firm performance.

This paper used secondary data derived from publicly listed firms in Kenya during 2002-2010 and analyzed the data using fixed effects regression model to test the effect of board demographic and strategic change, while moderated regression analysis was used to test the moderating effect of firm performance.

The results partially supported board demographic diversity–strategic change hypothesis. In particular, results indicate that age diversity produces less strategic change, while functional diversity is associated with greater levels of strategic change. The moderated regression results do not support our general logic that high firm performance enhances board demographic diversity–strategic change relationship. In effect, the results reveal that at high level of firm performance, board demographic diversity produces less strategic change.

Despite few studies that have examined board demographic diversity and firm performance, this paper introduces strategic change as an outcome variable. This paper also explores the moderating role of firm performance in board demographic diversity–strategic change relationship, and finally, the study uses Kenyan dataset which in itself is unique because most governance and strategy research uses data from developed countries.

With many years’ economic transformation from “Made in China” to “Created in China,” the State Council has set May 10th as annual “China’s Brand Day” from 2017. This action indicates the implementation of brand strategy and the new national policy of promoting China’s brands. The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of marketing background of top management team (TMT) on trademark and brand output.

Using the trademark application data of Chinese-listed companies, this paper constructs a multiple linear regression model and uses the OLS method. This research also uses two-stage regression to examine the effect of endogeneity on the results.

Our results show that the higher the proportion of executives with marketing background in TMT, the more the number of trademark applications. Furthermore, we document that the positive impact of TMT marketing background on the number of trademark applications is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises, companies with more patent output and companies whose CEO has marketing background, indicating that when TMT can play a bigger role, companies have better innovation ability and team collaboration is more efficient, the promoting role of TMT marketing background on the number of corporate trademark applications will be stronger.

This research focuses on the world’s largest emerging economy – China, which is different from the existing literature that is mainly based on western developed countries. With China’s economy stepping into a new normal and consumption upgrading, it is important and worthy of a deep discussion about which factors affect the company’s trademark and brand management.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of chief executive officer (CEO) international work experience, functional background and career concerns on managerially-distorted investment decisions.

This paper focuses on S&P 500 publicly held US manufacturing companies during the period from 2009 to 2012. The data related to the CEOs’ international experience and their functional background experience are manually collected from Business Week’s Corporate Elite. Financial data is retrieved from COMPUSTAT database. The data for CEO tenure and age are retrieved from the ExecuComp database. Besides ordinary least squares regression, this paper conducts two-stage least squares regression analysis. Endogeneity and additional tests are also considered in this paper.

The findings show that CEO international work experience may not reduce under-investment, but it may exacerbate over-investment. CEO throughput functional background may exacerbate under-investment, but it may not reduce over-investment. Furthermore, CEO career concerns are useful in reducing the inefficient investments caused by international work experience and throughput functional background. These results remain similar when potential self-selection bias, as well as alternative measures of career concerns and investment efficiency, are considered.

This paper contributes to the existing literature in the following ways: first, while a significant amount of attention has been paid to how investment decisions are affected by financial reporting quality and material internal control weaknesses, there has been little evidence accumulated related to how managers’ international experience, professional background and career concerns affect investment inefficiency. The authors attempt to fill this gap. Second, the authors manually collect the international experience and functional backgrounds of CEOs working for S&P 500 US manufacturing companies. This unique data set makes it possible to complement previous studies by investigating the effects of managerial international experience and functional background on investment behavior. Finally, previous theoretical studies have long recognized that managers’ career concerns affect their corporate investment decisions. These studies suggest that young CEOs have a greater incentive to signal their abilities by adopting more active and possibly riskier investment strategies, thus raising the moral hazard problem with regard to firm investments. The authors enrich these studies by showing that work experience alleviates the moral hazard problem with respect to young CEOs’ investment decisions.

Penrose’s argument regarding the managerial constraint on continual expansion over two consecutive periods is termed the “Penrose effect,” a relatively less investigated premise in Penrose’s growth theory. The purpose of this paper is to empirically re-examine the Penrose effect from the perspective of upper echelons theory and investigated how top management team (TMT) composition influences the continual growth of a firm.

This study empirically tested the hypotheses based on a sample of listed manufacturing firms operating in Taiwan, a newly industrialized economy in the Asia–Pacific region. Moderated hierarchical regression analyses were applied to test hypotheses.

The empirical results suggest that low TMT diversity (in terms of educational, functional and team tenure diversity) is likely to engender a situation in which the Penrose effect might occur. Additionally, the results indicate that the proportion of functional executives plays a significant role in influencing the growth trend over two consecutive periods and may soften the impact of the Penrose effect.

This paper suggests that appropriate structuring of TMTs and appropriate management of their members’ backgrounds and team tenure diversity can help firms overcome the Penrose effect and grow continually. Furthermore, the proportion of functional executives in a TMT is influential.

This paper uniquely contributes to the theoretical and empirical development of Penrose’s growth theory, upper echelons theory and resource-based view concerning managerial resources.

The past two decades have witnessed a transformation in the corporate human resource (HR) function – moving away from a role of balancing multiple interests toward a narrower focus on business objectives – yet we know little about how this change occurred. This study finds that the functional backgrounds of senior HR managers played an important role in determining the changing health benefits of large corporations. Managers with finance backgrounds controlled costs more than those with traditional HR backgrounds and contracted with fewer health plans – yet surprisingly without measured differences in health care quality management. These results suggest that more attention should be paid to the backgrounds of managers in the wider evolution of HR.

The authors analyze the association between the functional background of the compensation committee chair and CEO compensation. The analysis is motivated by the continuing debate about the reasonableness of executive pay patterns and the growing emphasis on the role of compensation committees.

The authors define three expert categories—accounting, finance, and generalist—and collect data on the compensation committee (CC) chairs of the S&P 500 firms from 2008 to 2018. The authors run an ordinary least square model and regress CEO total and cash compensation on the three expert categories.

The authors find that firms in which the CC chair has expertise in accounting, finance, and general business favor performance measures that are more aligned with accounting, finance, and general business, respectively. There is little evidence that CC chairs who are CEOs of other firms endorse more generous pay for the host CEO; the authors find some evidence that CC chairs tenure relative to the host CEO's is negatively associated with the level of the CEO's pay.

This study suggests that firms and regulators should consider the background of the compensation committee chair to understand the variations in top executive.

Companies desiring to link executive compensation to particular areas of strategy must also consider matching the functional background of the compensation committee chair with the target strategy areas. From regulatory standpoint, requiring compensation committees to operate independent of inside directors can reduce attempts by inside directors to skim the process, but a failure to also consider the impact of compensation committees' discretion over the pay-setting process can distort the executives' pay-performance relation.

This is the first study to examine the effects of the functional background of the compensation committee chair on CEO compensation.