Research On Top Management Team Social Network, Operation Process And Perpormance

Since the 80s of the 20th century, business environment is becoming more complex and displaying dynamic characteristics, business strategy research priorities changed from CEO or individual leaders to top management team. Western scholars have launched a fruitful exploration of top management team composition, structure, operating process and their impact on organizational performance, and have formed a rich research results. As the differences between China and western countries in system characteristics and cultural backgrounds, whether western top management team theories are applicable to Chinese companies, as well as exploring local top management team theories are becoming more and more urgent and have became important research areas concerned to Chinese scholars. Therefore, researches on local top management team theories have a certain theoretical and practical significance.This paper took the YTO Group Co., Ltd. in China for example, viewed from the social network theory perspective, combined specification and empirical research methods and revealed the affect mechanism between social network characteristics of the top management team, team operating process and organizational performance. This paper studied the relationship between social network characteristics of top management team and the team operating process, relationship between social network characteristics, team performance and organizational performance, and relationship between team operating process, team performance and organizational performance.Main conclusions of this paper are as follows:social network centrality has a positive influence to team trust, team performance and organizational performance. At the same time social network centrality can inhibit team emotional conflicts, but will not reduce the team cognitive conflict. Work-oriented trust and relationship-oriented trust have a significant positive effect on both the team performance and organizational performance. Work-oriented trust can inhibit cognitive conflict and relationship-oriented trust can inhibit the team emotional conflict. Cognitive conflict and emotional conflict both have a negative influence on organizational performance. Emotional conflict has a negative effect on team performance, but the positive effect of the cognitive conflict on team performance was not significant. Team performance and organizational performance are positively related.Innovations of this paper are as follows:(1) Based on social network theory to research top management team is an attempt. The paper has built a theoretical model between TMT social network characteristics, team operating process, and performance, which is an innovative work having rich theoretical significance. (2) This study suggests that concerned to top management team in Chinese enterprises, particularly in China's state-owned medium and large enterprises, all the team members are not in an equality position. The main leader of the team plays a significant role in team characteristics, operating processes and organizational performance, which tells us to select team leaders carefully and when doing research we should distinguish between leaders and ordinary top management functions. (3) Research findings of this paper demonstrate the "diffuse" feature of Chinese culture, that is, Chinese people tend to blur the boundaries between work and personal life and tend to turn their cognitive conflict with other members during working into emotional conflicts, leading to cognitive conflict's positive effects on organizational performance became much less significant, this conclusion is inconsistent with the West's.(4) As far as Chinese state-owned enterprise concerned when building top management team, we should not only consider the complementary nature of team members in skills and characteristics, but also consider whether they are they are willing followers and willing to play the role of assistant in the team.