Social Vs. Experiential Diversity

Résumé du livre

By building on Hambrick and Mason's (1984) Upper Echelons Theory (UET), this study examines the ambiguous relationship between top management team (TMT) diversity and firm performance in the context of the 100 largest listed Swiss companies in the years 2009 and 2013. Previous research on this topic has yielded inconclusive results, which may be explained by wrong conceptualizations of diversity as well as insufficient attention to contextual factors. In particular, this study contributes to existing research by shedding light on the role that the CEO plays as central to the dynamics that define the relationship between TMT diversity and firm performance. In a first step, the study at hand investigates the distinct effects of different types of diversity - namely social and experiential diversity - in the form of composites as well as those of underlying individual diversity attributes. Subsequently, the moderating role of the timespan that a CEO has worked together with the other members of the TMT is explored regarding the performance effect of each of these types and attributes. While this study finds that the diversity composites as well as almost all investigated individual diversity attributes are directly and positively related to firm performance, the moderated regression analysis suggests that these relationships are contingent on contextual conditions. In particular, it shows that if certain contextual contingencies are considered, only social diversity in general, as well as gender and nationality diversity in specific, have significant positive effects on firm performance, while age diversity as well as experiential diversity and its respective attributes are not related to firm performance. In addition, the moderated regression analysis shows that overlapping CEO-TMT tenure moderates the performance effect of both the social diversity composite and gender diversity.