Top management team decision-making : a multi-level approach to understanding demographic and cognitive variation, team processes and decision belief.

摘要

Based within the 'upper echelons' tradition, the starting premise for this thesis is thatuddemographic attributes such as age, functional background, educational attainment,udgender, and tenure, influence the decisions made by top management teams (TMTs)ud(Pfeffer, 1983; Hambrick & Mason, 1984). Unlike most studies, which use publicudarchival data, artificial teams, or retrospective interviews with a couple of selectedudsenior executives, this research design (which is unprecedented in the TMTudliterature), investigated the decision making processes, in real time, of 23 authenticudand fully functioning TMTs in the UK manufacturing sector using a state-of-the-artudbusiness simulation.udFrom a concentrated literature review which focused exclusively on TMTs,udand disentangled the constructs of dissimilarzfy (individual level differences) anduddiversity (team level differences), a series of propositions were established. Theseudhypothesized that demographic variation would lead to cognitive variation, that bothudthese types of variation would influence team processes, which in turn would affectuddecision belief.udDespite the meticulous precision with which the constructs were measured inudthis research, and even with the application of sophisticated multi-level modelingudtechniques, only limited and sporadic support was observed for these predictions.udAlthough there were slightly more findings than one would expect by chance aloneud(27 from a possible 177), these tended to be isolated and formed no clear pattern.udMoreover, when one went beyond tests of simple statistical significance andudreviewed effect sizes, all 27 results were tiny. The conclusion of this research is thatuddemographic attributes are not nearly as influential in real TMTs as 'upper echelons'udtheory (Hambrick & Mason, 1984) supposes.udIt is argued that the lack of convincing results is due to over-riding andudinherent social factors in authentic TMTs, so that individual demographic differencesudcease to be novel or important during strategic decision-making discussions. Theudpractical, theoretical and methodological implications of retaining the global nulludhypothesis are discussed in the final chapters.