Journal
JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT
Volume 48, Issue 6, Pages 1548-1601Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/01492063211072459
Keywords
top management teams; upper echelon; strategic leadership; corporate governance
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This study reviews the literature on top management teams (TMTs) and finds discrepancies and lack of consistency in conceptual definitions and operationalizations. The researchers propose a definition of the TMT that integrates insights from the academic and practitioner communities, and provide a roadmap for future research.
Who constitutes the top management team (TMT)? What are the boundary conditions that distinguish the TMT from other managers? Despite nearly four decades of TMT research, the concept of the TMT remains poorly defined and often goes undefined in empirical TMT research. We conducted a review of the TMT literature to better understand how the TMT construct is conceptualized and operationalized, to identify gaps in alignment and consistency, and to develop a roadmap for scholars to improve both aspects of the literature. We review all TMT-related papers published in Financial Times 50 (FT50) journals between 1984 and 2019. Our analysis reveals (1) a wide discrepancy in conceptual definitions of the TMT among the minority of studies actually providing a conceptual definition, (2) operationalizations seemingly based more on data availability rather than alignment with a conceptual definition, and as a result, (3) an overall lack of coherence in understanding of the TMT phenomenon. We explore these challenges, develop a definition of the TMT that integrates insight from the academic and practitioner communities, and build a roadmap for future TMT and upper echelons research.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available