What characterizes effective management teams? A research-based approach.

Abstract

Most organizations use management teams at different levels in the hierarchy to oversee and coordinate their businesses. Such teams typically make decisions, solve problems, coordinate tasks, and keep one another informed, and they can strongly influence the performance of an organization. Hence it is vital to identify factors that are associated with effective management-team performance. Based on a review of international research on management and decision-making teams from the early 1980s through today, we have identified a number of variables that seem to be important for the effectiveness of management teams. The variables are organized into 4 different categories: (a) input factors, which are relatively stable characteristics of the team and its environment (team purpose, team tasks, team size, team composition, and reward systems); (b) process factors, which refer to how the team works (meeting goals, focused communication, handling of task and relationship conflict, dialogical communication, political behavior, behavioral integration, external relationships, team learning behavior, and team leadership); (c) emergent states, which are cognitive, motivational, and affective states that emerge from the team members’ interaction (team psychological safety, team cohesion, and functional team norms); and (d) output factors, which describe the different kinds of outcomes achieved by the team (task performance and individual well-being and growth). In this paper, we discuss the empirical research behind each of the variables and how the variables are associated with management-team effectiveness.

Managerial Behavior, Environmental Dynamics and Organizational Performance

“…Priem (1990) agrees with Hambrick and Mason (1984), but adds that the level of consensus within senior management teams is likely to be related to performance, with low consensus teams doing best in dynamic contexts and high consensus teams performing best in stable environments. In support of these opposing viewpoints, Homburg et al (1999) discovered that senior management team consensus has a smaller impact on performance in dynamic rather than stable situations (Bang & Midelfart, 2017).…”

Top management team meetings and firm performance

“…Prior literature on the effectiveness of management teams has focused on areas such as input factors, process factors and task performance (Bang and Midelfart, 2017). Input factors comprise the characteristics of the team and its environment, including team purpose, team tasks and team size and composition.…”

“…In this study, we propose using the frequency of top management team meetings as a new measure of the behavior of company managers. Prior research on the effectiveness of top management teams has examined input and process factors, such as team composition, Team meetings and firm performance team purpose, team leadership and intra-team behavior (Hambrick and Mason, 1984;Zaccaro et al, 2001;Carpenter et al, 2004;Wageman et al, 2008;Bang and Midelfart, 2017). We progress this literature by using publicly disclosed data on top management team meetings and investigate if top management team meeting frequency can be used as a summary measure of top management team effectiveness.…”

Looking back to look ahead: Thanks for the ride; can’t wait to see what’s next!

“…We were fortunate to publish, for the first time in CPJ , articles from such esteemed professionals as Manfred Kets de Vries (2014), Christina Maslach (2017), and Tatiana Bachkirova (2016; Myers & Bachkirova, 2018). Tatiana also belongs on another list: international authors bringing a more global perspective to the journal—for instance, Henning Bang and Tomas Midelfart (2017) from Norway, Peter Sørensen (2017) from Denmark, Erik de Haan and his colleagues in the United Kingdom (de Haan et al, 2017), Richta IJntema and her colleagues in Germany (IJntema et al, 2019), and Anthony Grant (2016) from Australia.…”

“…In the incoming editorial, I noted that the field needed more work in certain areas, but I am afraid we did not make the progress I had hoped to make. We had only a couple of articles on teams (Bang & Midelfart, 2017; Overfield, 2016) and not nearly enough on diversity and the impact of the workplace becoming more cross-cultural, intergenerational, and inclusive of historically marginalized populations with different backgrounds and lifestyles. And we barely scratched the surface on the most important question for executive leaders and organizational stakeholders: organizational performance.…”