ARE THERE ANY LINKAGES BETWEEN COGNITIVE DIVERSITY WITHIN THE TOP MANAGEMENT TEAMS AND STRATEGIC DECISION SPEED?

摘要

In the strategic management literature, top management teams (TMTs) and their strategicdecisions have been considered very important components for the firms' overall success.There is a great deal of research on this subject, designed to determine how TMTs maketheir decisions including antecedents and consequences of those decisions. Top managersin organizations are responsible for making critical decisions to increase firmperformance; and the upper echelons perspective (UEP) predicts that having a diversestructure in TMTs may affect those strategic decisions either in a positive or negativeway. In this paper, I explore how some of the observable characteristics of TMTs makean impact on cognitive diversity and how this diversity affects the executives' strategicdecision speed (SDS) depending on the dynamism of the environment. More specifically,I focus on the linkages between heterogeneity in team tenure and functional backgroundand the two important components of cognitive diversity, which are value and goalpreference diversity. Then, I explain how cognitive diversity relates to strategic decisionspeed and how this relationship may be affected by environmental dynamism.