Top Management Team Demography and Corporate Strategic Change

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between the demography of top management teams and corporate strategic change, measured as absolute change in diversification level, within a sample of Fortune 500 companies. Controlling for prior firm performance, organizational size, top team size, and industry structure, we found that the firms most likely to undergo changes in corporate strategy had top management teams characterized by lower average age, shorter organizational tenure, higher team tenure, higher educational level, higher educational specialization heterogeneity, and higher academic training in the sciences than other teams. The results suggest that top managers' cognitive perspectives, as reflected in a team's demographic characteristics, are linked to the team's propensity to change corporate strategy.