The impacts of top management team characteristics on entrepreneurial strategic orientation

Abstract

Purpose – The paper aims to empirically examine the questions of how top management team (TMT) characteristics, including TMT heterogeneity and vertical dyads differences between TMT and Board Director, influence entrepreneurial strategic orientation, as well as how industry environment and corporate ownership moderate those relationships. Design/methodology/approach – The paper designs the panel data on the listed companies of China's Small and Medium-sized Enterprises Board for the period 2006-2010, and uses hierarchical regression analysis and grouping regression analysis when examining the relationships among variables involved. Findings – The paper provides empirical insights about how top management team (TMT) characteristics, including TMT heterogeneity and vertical dyads differences between TMT and Board Director, influence entrepreneurial strategic orientation, as well as how industry environment and corporate ownership moderate those relationships. It suggests that, except for TMT educational background, the heterogeneity of TMT age, gender, functional experience, and the vertical dyad differences between TMT and board chairperson significantly and positively impact ESO. Furthermore, industry environment and corporate ownership will moderate the relationship between TMT characteristics and ESO. Originality/value – This paper fulfills an identified need to study how top management team characteristics influence entrepreneurial strategic orientation, as well as how industry environment and corporate ownership moderate those relationships.

Entrepreneurial Orientation and the Family Firm: Mapping the Field and Tracing a Path for Future Research

“…However, multiple personal traits remain unresearched, and only one work included in this literature review studied the moderating effect of female involvement in governance on the EOperformance link with significant and positive results . This result is in line with other research that shows that there are differences between male and female executives regarding their entrepreneurial intentions and behaviors (Yang & Wang, 2014) and their method of managing resources (Bird & Brush, 2002). Considering that "family businesses are among the few areas where there are real opportunities for women to reach the highest positions in business" (Salganicoff, 1990, p. 128) and that upper echelon theory (Hambrick & Mason, 1984) states that strategic choices are determined and shaped by the values and cognitive bases of the dominant players in the organization, we propose using this theory to investigate whether the CEO's gender or the gender diversity of the TMT and boardroom moderates the relationship between EO and family firm economic or family-oriented goals.…”

The Role of Management Control Systems and Top Teams in Implementing Environmental Sustainability Policies

“…Top management teams are considered to have the potential to achieve strategy implementation and make the organizations more effective [21,22]. The adoption of environmental sustainability policies often requires that top management teams redefine goals and functions, which can create a level or uncertainty for subordinates as to priorities on which to focus their attention in the short-term [16,17].…”

Top management team characteristics and organizational creativity

“…Although some recent research connects TMT characteristics/vision consensus to organizational innovation, learning, or performance (e.g. Mihalache et al 2012;Heyden et al 2013;Yang and Wang 2014), creativity is a different concept from innovation or learning. Amabile (1998) viewed creativity as a requisite for innovation.…”

“…Tesluk et al 1997;Taggar 2002;Egan 2005;Perry-Smith 2006;Hirst et al 2009;Shin et al 2012;Venkataramani et al 2013;Carmeli and Paulus 2014) and the firm level (e.g. Amabile 1998;Tesluk et al 1997;Martins and Terblanche 2003;Shalley and Gilson 2004;Zhou and Shalley 2008;Puccio and Cabra 2010;Camelo-Ordaz et al 2012;Mihalache et al 2012;Yang and Wang 2014;Yuan et al 2014). Research on individual-level creativity focuses on creativity of individual members of firms or teams and on how to make people creative.…”