A Study on the Relationship between Top Management Team Characteristics and Firm Performance from a Team Life Cycle Perspective

Abstract

As the most important human resource of an enterprise, top management has received much attention from many researchers, and the top echelon theory proposed by Hambrick and Mason (1984) has laid a theoretical cornerstone for the study of the relationship between the characteristics of the top management team and the performance of the enterprise.Existing studies have focused on the impact of top management team characteristics on firm performance by using top management team demographic characteristics as a proxy variable for measuring top management team characteristics. However, from empirical studies, the relationship between top management team characteristics and firm performance has yet to achieve consistent conclusions. This paper reviews the research lineage of the relationship between top management team characteristics and corporate performance, analyzes the limitations of the existing research, and proposes future research directions in this field with a new perspective on the team life cycle.