Guest editorial

摘要

In the 30 years following the seminal work of Hambrick and Mason's (1984) "Upper echelons: The organization as a reflection of its top managers", research on executive management teams or top management teams (TMTs) has aroused extensive interest by academic scholars, business leaders and politicians alike (Bell et al., 2011). The central idea that Hambrick and Mason developed at that time was that executives act on the basis of their personalized interpretations of the situations and options they face and that the choices they make are a function of their idiosyncratic experiences, values and personalities (Hambrick, 2007). In this vein, Hambrick and Mason argue that if one wants to understand why organizations act the way they do, or why companies perform the way they do, it is mandatory to understand their most powerful actors - their executive management teams or TMTs (Hambrick, 2005). These ideas have galvanized researchers from various disciplines to put substantial effort into exploring how TMT characteristics affect the process of strategic choice and resulting performance outcomes as well as how TMTs are initially formed. Concerning the former, a primary interest of these studies lies in investigating how specific demographic diversity variables (e.g. gender diversity, educational background diversity, functional background diversity, national diversity) are related to performance outcomes, whereas TMT diversity refers to the distributional differences among members of the TMT with respect to a common attribute (Harrison and Klein, 2007). In this field, a lot of research has been devoted to corporate performance, as it is a particular outcome of interest, whereas other outcome variables, such as competitive behavior (Hambrick et al., 1996), innovativeness (Bantel and Jackson, 1989; Talke et al., 2011), geographic diversification (Tihanyi et al., 2000; Barkema and Shvyrkov, 2007) and strategic changes (Cho and Hambrick, 2006; Wiersema and Bantel, 1992), are only second-rate. A countless number of studies explored the impact of diversity on corporate performance, e.g. gender diversity (Campbell and Minguez-Vera, 2008; Dezsoe and Ross, 2012), age (Richard and Shelor, 2002), educational and functional diversity (Camelo et al., 2010; Cannella et al., 2008) or national diversity (Oxelheim and Randoy, 2003; Nielsen and Nielsen, 2013). The findings of these empirical studies on the effects of TMT demographic diversity on performance outcomes, however, remain highly controversial, as they range from positive (Barsade et al., 2000; Carpenter, 2002; Ely, 2004) through non-significant (Ferrier, 2001; West and Schenk, 1996) to negative (Michel and Hambrick, 1992). These ambiguous results pervade this field of research and, unfortunately, offer only limited guidance to practitioners and academics alike (Bell et al., 2011).