Research On The Relationship Between Top Management Team Characteristics And Firm Performance

All the enterprises are faced with complex market environment in China since the 21 st century. In such an environment, it’s a huge challenge for every firm to maintain good business performance, which top management team as executive decision-makers and business strategy work for. Since the upper echelons theory is proposed in, there exit a great deal of empirical analysis in western markets, which reveals the relationship between top management team characteristics and firm performance. It’s important to apply to the upper echelons in China, which is the world’s second largest economy as well as representatives of the emerging markets. This can expand the application space of upper echelons theory, analyze the impact of the special social and cultural background and compare different the results in difference culture.This paper is based on top echelon theory. After reviewing existing literature, this empirical research advances a research model and proposes relevant hypotheses. 269 China listed company of Shanghai is taken as a whole sample. Data analyzed by SPSS(Version16.0), the final conclusions are as following:Firstly, top management team tenure demographic and education demographic are both significantly negative related to performance.Secondly, top management team education professional background heterogeneity is significantly negative related to performance; top management team gender heterogeneity is significantly positive related to performance.Thirdly, there is negative moderate relationship between the interaction on proportion of state owned stock and top management team tenure heterogeneity; here is negative moderate relationship between the interaction on proportion of state owned stock and top management team gender heterogeneity.Fourthly, there is negative moderate relationship between the team size of TMT and corporate performance.