Abstract

an earlier version of this paper, and to members of the Senior Teams Workshop and the Negotiations, Organizations, and Markets Seminar at the Harvard Business School for ideas and inspiration. We benefited from comments provided by three anonymous reviewers and the Editor of Leadership Quarterly. A DYNAMIC MODEL OF TOP MANAGEMENT TEAM EFFECTIVENESS: MANAGING UNSTRUCTURED TASK STREAMS Leadership research relating top management team demographics to firm performance has produced mixed empirical results. This paper suggests a new explanation for these inconsistencies. We first note that a given top management team (TMT) is likely to face a variety of different situations over time. Thus, while TMT demographic composition is relatively stable, the TMT task is dynamic and variable. In some situations, team members have similar information and interests (a symmetric distribution); in others, information or interests diverge (an asymmetric distribution). Based on team effectiveness theory, we then argue that, unless group process is managed accordingly, asymmetric distributions of situation-specific information and interests will reduce TMT decision-making effectiveness. We develop leader process choices to mitigate the potentially

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