This paper documents significant partisan divides across a range of corporate cultural values. Using panel data of 2,424 S&P 1500 firms spanning the period from 2001 to 2018, we find that firms whose top management teams lean toward the Democratic Party exhibit higher cultural values of integrity, teamwork, innovation, respect, and quality, in comparison with firms with executives leaning toward the Republican Party. In addition, we find that the partisan gap diminishes when firms have less entrenched management or locate in states with stronger judicial accountability. Our findings lend support to earlier research suggesting that leader characteristics are associated with corporate culture.

This research examines the characteristics of the age demographic of a top management team (TMT) as drivers of a firm's environmental management (EM) strategy comprising compliance-only and beyond-compliance initiatives. Using a matched sample of publicly listed firms in Kinder, Lydenberg, and Domini and Bloomberg, panel data regression techniques on a unique dataset of 3,251 firm-year observations suggest that a link does exist. Driven by a desire for legacy and a preference for risk-averse decisions, aging TMTs will support beyond-compliance initiatives. On the other hand, age diversity is expected to enhance the innovative potential of a TMT for solving pressing compliance-related environmental issues. The study finds that aging TMTs support beyond-compliance as compared to compliance-only EM strategies. TMT age diversity, though helpful in developing compliance-only initiatives, is not instrumental in driving beyond-compliance initiatives. The study highlights the challenges in developing a comprehensive EM strategy suggesting paths for future research.

Research on top management team (TMT) diversity suggests that diverse backgrounds improve technological exploration. However, this diversity may also cause demographic faultlines that break a team into subgroups and undermine team performance, and the status difference between CEO and top managers may change inter-subgroup dynamics. We predicted that TMT faultline had an inverted U-shape relationship with technological exploration. Further, we predicted that the effects of TMT faultline were more prominent when the CEO is in the minority subgroup than when the CEO was in the majority subgroup. Using a longitudinal sample from the US IT services industry, the results found that TMT faultline exhibited an inverted U-shape relationship with technological exploration only when the CEO was in the minority subgroup, and such relationship disappeared when the CEO was in the majority subgroup.

Despite extensive research on organizational virtue, our understanding about factors that promote virtue within organizations remains unclear. Drawing on upper echelon theory, we examine the relationship between five top management team (TMT) characteristics and organizational virtue orientation (OVO)—the integrated set of values and beliefs that support ethical traits and virtuous behaviors of an organization. Specifically, we utilize prospectuses of initial public offering (IPO) firms and 10-K post-IPO filings to explore how TMT composition with respect to member age, tenure, education, functional background, and gender influences OVO. Additionally, we examine the moderating effects of organizational size, and argue that the more expansive structures and processes associated with larger organizations diminish the main relationships. Our findings, using two sources of data, are consistent, but somewhat mixed in their support for our hypotheses. Overall, TMT characteristics do appear to influence OVO, but in more complex and counterintuitive ways than initially expected.

This paper explores whether top management teams’ (TMTs) knowledge and experience are significant predictors of a firm’s strategic decisions and organization outcomes. The existing research throws little light on how firms with limited resources embedded in TMTs, particularly in emerging markets, innovate and achieve success in foreign countries. We focus on the impact of TMTs’ functional background heterogeneity and international experience on innovation and internationalization, as well as examine the relationship between innovation, internationalization and performance. The proposed relationships are empirically investigated in a sample of Taiwanese-listed companies operating in the electronics industry. The results demonstrate a positive association between a TMT’s functional background heterogeneity and a firm’s innovation. Moreover, a TMT’s international experience relates positively to a firm’s innovation and internationalization, therefore firms with a higher level of innovation achieve a higher level of internationalization.

Although the role of top teams has been recognized in ambidextrous organizations, it remains unclear which characteristics and how the cognitive processes of top teams are used to address the dual cognitive challenges of ambidexterity. To address this puzzle, I developed a model in which I theorize that a top team with task-related diversity engaging in perspective taking will influence the achievement of an ambidextrous organization. Moreover, I further theorize that transformational leadership of the CEO will help diverse top teams master ambidexterity by influencing the team's cognitive processes. The results show that diverse teams can address the differentiating-integrating challenges of ambidexterity when they engage in perspective taking. The results also confirm that transformational leadership strengthens the relationship between a diverse top team's perspective taking and ambidextrous orientation.

In this article, we propose that types of CEO paternalistic leadership will affect the effectiveness of top management team (TMT) decisions, and that team conflict will play a mediating role in the relationship between CEO paternalistic leadership and decision effectiveness in the Chinese context. Data collected from 108 TMTs in China suggest that dimensions of paternalistic leadership significantly affect decision effectiveness: benevolent and moral leadership positively affect TMT decision effectiveness, but authoritarian leadership has negative effects on TMT decision effectiveness. In addition, cognitive and affective team conflicts partially mediate the links between paternalistic leadership types and decision effectiveness. The results suggest that CEO paternalistic leadership approaches and conflict modes significantly determine TMT decision effectiveness.

Faultline configurations in top management teams are of vital importance in predicting firm outcomes. Grounded in faultline theory, we hypothesise the positive effects of faultlines through the dual routes of coordination and information processing under conditions of various subgroup configuration types. Second-hand data from publicly traded Chinese information technology firms are used to test our hypotheses. The results demonstrate that TMT faultline strength is positively related to a firm’s short-term performance only when both the number and the balance of subgroups are high and is positively related to a firm’s innovation activities only when the number of subgroups is high and the balance of subgroups is low. This study contributes to faultline theory by enriching the connotation of faultlines with the configurational perspective and advancing the debate on the effects of team faultlines as we reveal the benefits of TMT faultlines.

This study supports tournament theory in relation to high levels of organizational hierarchies, indicating that the job complexity facing the top management team supposes that pay dispersion positively influences firm performance. Examining a sample of 709 firm-year observations of Spanish listed companies spanning the period 2004–2012, our results indicate that the association between firm performance and top management team pay dispersion is conditional on the effectiveness of corporate governance. High top management team pay dispersion is associated with better performance in owner-controlled firms, where more effective monitoring is exerted by the board of directors.