Search results

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the influence of top management team diversity on academic excellence in universities. Academic excellence is conceptualized as successfully gaining funds for inter-organizational research collaborations, interdisciplinary graduate schools and high-ranked scientific reputation.

The study applies upper echelon theory to universities. Three hypotheses are developed: (overall) top management team heterogeneity is positively associated with successful funding of excellence clusters, (overall) top management team heterogeneity is positively associated with successful funding of graduate schools and (overall) top management team heterogeneity is positively associated with academic reputation. The empirical study is based on a cross-sectional dataset with a time lag, covering characteristics of 75 German public universities from 2008 to 2013. Multiple-regression analysis is applied to test the hypotheses.

Our results indicate that disciplinary and educational diversity of upper echelons has a positive effect on the outcomes. Other top management team characteristics (age, gender, etc.) show no significant effects. Besides top management team composition, we find that a high number of faculties and a broad inclusion of internal status groups (students, tenured faculty, academic and administrative staff) and external stakeholders in decision making processes may enhance academic excellence of universities.

First, the study contributes to the body of literature concerned with higher education. It is situated at the crossroads of management studies and higher education research, unlocking strategic management theorizing for the public context. Furthermore, the study contributes to the body of literature on strategic leadership in pluralistic organizations. It highlights the importance of heterogeneous governance structures and modular organization designs for achieving academic excellence.

The paper may inform practitioners in administrative or leading positions and policy-makers concerned with higher education. The more diverse a top management team is in terms of multiple disciplinary backgrounds, the more likely they succeed in driving the university toward academic excellence.

The study is among the first to evaluate the influence of top management teams in universities with a quantitative research design.

How do shareholders know if corporate managers are doing their jobs? This paper aims to propose using top management team meetings as a measure of the behavior of company managers. More meetings may indicate effective effort by top management to enhance company performance. Alternatively, more meetings may reflect procrastination and decision paralysis.

Using top management team meeting data publicly disclosed by Indonesian companies during 2010–2017, this study tests for these hypothesized relationships between top management team meeting frequency and firm performance.

This study found that top management team meetings are positively related to firm performance, indicating that more meetings do represent more effective effort by top management teams. Further analysis shows that only firms that consistently hold more meetings than their peers perform better, particularly during periods of poor performance.

This study highlights top management team meetings as a valid signal of management effort and suggests there should be louder calls for disclosure of these types of executive performance metrics around the world.

Presents an analysis of Austrian top managers and top management teams based on data gathered from Austrian managers in 301 separate organizations. Through the data collected, builds and presents a comprehensive picture of the current state of Austrian management. Also gives a profile of how Austrian managers compare in certain key competence areas with managers from some of the other European countries in which similar research has been conducted. Shows that in general, Austrian management teams have few interpersonal or value‐based interaction difficulties, but that their key problems, and the key development issues facing them, lie in their ability to understand and manage the structure of their organizations, long‐term issues, and the increasingly competitive and global markets and environments into which their companies are entering. Shows that it is these key areas which are the major sources of conflict, sensitivity, and difficulty within Austrian top management teams. Based on these findings, presents some management development recommendations for Austrian managers to assist in broadening their management competences and thus enhancing their personal, organizational, and business success.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the impact of top management teams on firms' value chain action intensity and value chain activity heterogeneity.

The study was conducted from an emerging market perspective. The sample was based on the secondary data collected from three fast-growing industries in India: automobile, pharmaceutical and fast-moving consumer goods over the three-year period from 2009 to 2012. The Panel Poisson and Tobit regression have been used to conduct this study.

Drawing upon the upper echelon theory, the author found that a top management team's educational level, functional heterogeneity and total organizational tenure influence value chain action intensity and value chain activity heterogeneity.

The author introduces the concept of value chain action intensity and value chain action heterogeneity and investigates the role of the upper echelon in influencing intensity and heterogeneity.

The chapter focuses on the personal characteristics of top executives in companies involved in corporate financial crime as well as the introduction of human governance as one of the mechanisms in preventing corporate misbehaviour. This chapter discusses directors’ and top management teams’ personal characteristics – in the context of corporate governance – that may influence the occurrence of corporate financial crime. The study further proposes the human governance factor as a possible mechanism to improve corporate governance in preventing such misbehaviour. This chapter highlights the personal characteristics of top executives, which may become the indicators of corporate financial crime, as well as human governance, which is shown to be one of the most important mechanisms of corporate governance for corporate financial crime prevention.

Since the mid-1980s, much research attention has been devoted to top management teams and their impact on the strategic behavior and performance of firms. In particular, this research has focused on the role of top managers’ background, values, and experiences in explaining the choices they make. So far, this research has largely failed to address the national context in which top management teams are formed and operate. Empirical studies have typically involved top management teams of U.S. firms. Other studies are rare, and when they exist, they usually do not take the national context into account. This paper explores the impact of national context characterized by society-specific value systems and institutions, on the composition, organization, and functioning of top management. We address three topics in particular: (1) national variations in the structure and practices of top management and their implications for managerial choices; (2) national governance systems that define and constrain the tasks and functioning of top management teams; and (3) national institutions that help to define managerial selection, promotion, and career patterns.

The purpose of this study is to expand on previous research conducted by Hornsby et al. that examined the corporate entrepreneurship internal factor of managerial attitude.

This paper develops and tests a group level factor of knowledge, the explication of tacit knowledge and a factor of managerial attitude, namely leadership support that is inherently multi‐level in nature.

Leadership support is significant at both the dyad level and at the group level of analysis. Ordinary least squares regression supported the main hypothesis, that leadership support has a direct positive impact on explication of tacit knowledge.

Successfully testing the group level significance of leadership support has implications for future research because it is considered an individual level variable. Developing and testing the explication of tacit knowledge construct contributes to research on knowing in organisations because it provides a metric that is an indicator of the explication of tacit knowledge.

These research findings have management implications for the way local government creates innovative top management teams to facilitate local economic and community development.

This paper represents an early contribution to the literature.

This paper aims to demonstrate that corporate philanthropy can be driven from the bottom to the top. In particular, the authors investigate whether employees’ donations influence corporate philanthropy and under what conditions this effect occurs.

The sample consists of Chinese listed firms that disclosed the amount employees donated in response to the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. The Heckman two-stage selection model is applied to examine the effect of employees’ donations on corporate philanthropy and the conditions under which this effect occurs.

The results show that employees’ donations are positively associated with corporate philanthropy. Furthermore, a higher percentage of females in top management teams can significantly strengthen the effect of employees’ donations on corporate philanthropy. When the average age of the top management team members is high, the influence of employees’ donations on corporate philanthropy is stronger.

This is an empirical study that helps to predict corporate philanthropy. Another practical implication is that employees should be recognized as an important element of corporate social responsibility.

The results encourage employees to become drivers of corporate social responsibility.

This study contributes to the corporate social responsibility literature by demonstrating that corporate philanthropy can be driven from the bottom to the top. Moreover, this study integrates signaling theory into the study of corporate social responsibility. Finally, this study identifies two important contingent factors that strengthen the effect of employees on top managers’ decisions about corporate social responsibility.

Presents an original top management team‐based approach to management competences. Based on the results of a survey of thousands of top executives across Europe and many years of in‐depth consultancy and research with top executives, presents a practical guide to the key top management team competences identified by top executives as essential to success and to the impact of poor performance in these key competence areas. Additionally, presents the results in a cross‐cultural framework and outlines the need, in an international business environment, for a heightened understanding of the impact of cultural differences in management behaviour, performance, and expectations. Also considers the management development implications of the findings.

The purpose of this paper is to form propositions about the relationship between the cognitive composition of the top management team and its view of the viable strategy for a firm.

The cognitive style of 58 members of ten top management teams were analyzed using the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the strategy types based on Miles and Snow typology were defined using the paragraph approach. Descriptive statistics were used in the analysis.

Based on data from the ten top management teams in the spa industry, this study proposes that the cognitive composition of the top management team affects the strategies they prefer. Further, it is proposed that intuitive‐thinking top management teams prefer either a prospector or an analyzer strategy. A defender or an analyzer strategy is preferred by sensing‐thinking top management teams. Defining the composition of the top management team using the cognitive style is proposed to be a more promising way to explain the homogeneity or heterogeneity of the team than traditional measures such as age or education in this context.

For the top management teams, the results of this study emphasize the importance of knowing the cognitive composition of the top management team and especially taking it into consideration during strategic decision‐making.

This study extends existing research by illuminating the relationships between the cognitive composition of the top management team and the strategy type and also confirms several results drawn from previous studies concerning manager‐strategy relationships. This paper also attempts to inspire researchers to take cognitive composition into consideration when studying the influences the top management team has on a firm's strategy.