| This research examines how top management team tenure and age demography influence innovativeness. Do top management teams differ in more innovative firms than less innovative firms? Based on a sample of eleven manufacturing industries and 71 firms, and using a pooled times series design of seven years (1982 to 1988) with a two year lag structure (N = 355), the findings suggest that top management teams do influence firm innovativeness.; Not all organizational change is innovation, but all innovation is organizational change. Organizational ecology theory on change (e.g., need for survival, risk) is used to develop hypotheses. Organizational demography, top management team, and innovation research are integrated to develop specific hypotheses on how top management team demography promotes innovativeness.; Organizational demography and top management team research show that these teams influence outcomes, but the findings conflict as to whether greater tenure and age homogeneity or heterogeneity promotes better organizational outcomes. This research defines the top management team in four ways (the entire team, executive team, vice president team, and a combination of the executive and vice president teams) to test specific relationships of different team definitions (and their different demographic compositions) to innovativeness.; Innovativeness is defined as a firm's overall creative propensity to introduce new products and is measured as the number of patents awarded to a firm annually. Innovation research defines a successful innovation as comprised of two components, creativity and implementation. Team tenure and age demography is measured as the coefficient of variation.; Ordinary least squares is used to test how tenure and age demography, controlling for past innovativeness, firm size, performance, and either industry or firm dummy variables from time 1 (1982 to 1986) predict innovativeness at time 2 (1984 to 1988). Findings show that the executive team and vice president team are composed of two demographically distinct teams that influence innovativeness antithetically. Greater executive team tenure homogeneity accompanied by greater vice president team tenure heterogeneity promoted innovativeness. This finding suggests that vice president teams generate creative ideas that were most successfully implemented by homogeneous executive teams. Other analyses include different measures of demography and using Fortune's measure of innovativeness rating. |
