Performance effects of top management team demographic faultlines in the process of product diversification
研究了高层管理团队中任务相关断裂带和生物人口统计断裂带在产品多元化过程中对企业绩效的不同影响，发现任务相关断裂带提升绩效，而生物人口统计断裂带降低绩效。
Expanding into new product areas is an important part of the growth strategy of many firms, but there is still more to learn about how it affects firm performance. We believe that as the top management team ( TMT ) is responsible for coordinating product expansion, looking there can yield valuable clues. We argue that diversification entails significant additional information processing and that this strains top managerial resources. We hypothesize that task‐related faultlines within the TMT may help it cope with product expansion while bio‐demographic faultlines may hinder it. We find support for these hypotheses on a longitudinal sample of 2,730 expansion steps made by 61 German firms between 1985 and 2007: task related faultline strength increases performance when diversifying, while bio‐demographic faultline strength decreases it . Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.