Top Management Team Heterogeneity: Personality, Power, and Proxies
通过一项对全球金融公司高层管理团队的八年实地研究，比较了年龄、任期等常用代理指标与实际认知多样性的差异，并揭示了权力对测量结果的干扰，解释了以往研究结果不一致的原因。
This article reports partial results of an eight-year field study of the Top Management Teams (TMTs) of a global multidivisional financial services corporation and compares those results with large-sample work in the TMT literature. In particular, it investigates the operationalization of TMT cognitive diversity by the proxies of age, team tenure, industry experience, and functional background heterogeneity most often used in statistical work, and compares those operationalizations with cognitive diversity itself. In addition to highlighting which proxies seemed to most closely approximate cognitive diversity and why, it demonstrates the confounding impact of power on all operationalizations. A comparison of the field results with three representative studies with respect to the operationalization of the dependent variables of diversification, innovation, and performance helps to explain why previous TMT heterogeneity research has often produced inconsistent results or nonfindings. It offers some suggestions that should improve the robustness of statistical research and demonstrates the reciprocal usefulness of case and large-sample research.