The Effect Of Demographic Traits Of Top Management Team On Enterprise's Strategic Decision

Since "Upper Echelons Theory" has been proposed by Hambick and Mason in 1984, top management team became a hot issue in the research community. Top management team is the main group of the enterprise's strategic decision making. So, the research of top management team and relevant fields becomes the important subject that scholars and enterprise's administrators pay close attention to gradually.Based on this idea, this text aims at studying the effect of demographic traits of top management team on enterprise's strategic decision. The demographic traits include age heterogeneity, term heterogeneity, education degree heterogeneity and the professional background heterogeneity. According to strategic decision-making preference theory, the text offers the hypotheses that age heterogeneity, term heterogeneity, education degree heterogeneity and professional background heterogeneity will be positively related to strategic decision-making time; Age heterogeneity, term heterogeneity, education degree heterogeneity and professional background heterogeneity will be negatively related to strategic decision-making accuracy; Age heterogeneity, term heterogeneity, education degree heterogeneity and professional background heterogeneity will be positively related to strategic decision-making innovation.The text investigates 86 Tianjin enterprises' top management teams and uses average age, average term, average education degree, team size and firm size as the indirect variable to analyze it. After multiple regression analysis by SPSS17.0, at strategic decision-making time dimension, age heterogeneity, term heterogeneity and education degree heterogeneity are positively related to strategic decision-making time, but this study also finds, hypothesis between professional background heterogeneity with strategic decision-making time does not be hold. At strategic decision-making accuracy dimension, term heterogeneity, education degree heterogeneity and professional background heterogeneity are negatively related to strategic decision-making accuracy, but hypothesis between age heterogeneity with strategic decision-making accuracy does not be hold. At strategic decision-making innovation dimension, age heterogeneity, term heterogeneity, education degree heterogeneity and professional background heterogeneity are positively related to strategic decision-making innovation. Finally, the text discusses improving the positive effect and reducing the negative impact through improving top manangement team's cohesion.