Top Management Teams

Donald C. Hambrick

Chapter 1 in Handbook of Top Management Teams, 2010, pp 23-30 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Research on top management teams commenced in the organisations literature around 1980 (Bourgeois, 1980) and has been pervasive ever since (e.g., Bantel and Jackson, 1989; Carpenter et al., in press; Eisenhardt and Schoonhoven, 1990; Finkelstein and Hambrick, 1996; Fredrickson and Iaquinto, 1989; Hambrick, 1981). In an effort to move beyond an examination of individual leaders, researchers have widened their focus to the constellation of executives who roughly comprise what Cyert and March (1963) called the ‘dominant coalition’. Most such research has attempted to examine the effects of top management team characteristics on organisational outcomes, on the assumption that the collective dispositions and interactions of top managers affect the major choices they make (Hambrick and Mason, 1984). This wave of research is an important advance for executive leadership theory because of its recognition that the management of an enterprise is typically a shared activity, extending beyond the chief executive. Although there are instances when top managers have limited discretion over organisational outcomes (Hambrick and Finkelstein, 1987), in most organisations no other small group has as much potential to affect the form or fate of the enterprise as does the top management team.

Keywords: Management Journal; Strategic Management Journal; Organisational Outcome; Human Resource Practice; Chief Operate Officer (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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DOI: 10.1057/9780230305335_2

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