Individual-level heterogeneity and macro-level outcomes

摘要

Organization theory has traditionally been dominated by macro-level dieories focusing on understanding die behaviour of interacting organizations in relationship to their environments, while the individual has always been notoriously absent (Sorensen, 1999a). Organization theorists defended die omission of individuals on theoretical grounds because organizations are assumed to represent 'strong' situations precluding any substantial impact of individual heterogeneity (Davis-Blake and Pfeffer, 1989). Individual heterogeneity refers to all types of relatively stable individual characteristics that might be salient in understanding behaviour in the specific context at hand, including personality, values, beliefs, experiences and demographic features. In addition, some argued that selection processes imply that people at the strategic apex of the organization are homogeneous with respect to personality, values, cognition and demographics, so making the study of its impact a futile exercise. For external observers it might come as a surprise that it is only since the second half of the 1980s that researchers took the challenge to systematically investigate the interplay between the faith of organizations and the characteristics of their leaders. The impetus was given by the publication of the seminal paper of Hambrick and Mason (1984), who argued that people (especially those belonging to the dominant coalition) should more prominendy picture in dieories of organizations as they are the 'guts' of formal organizations (Stinchcombe, 1997: 17—18).