The Influence Of Top Management Team’s Structural Features On The Firm Performance

Under the background of growingly fierce competition and rapidly rising knowledge economy, single member of top management team (TMT) has been unable to meet the need of developing enterprises, top management team has been a significant way to operate a company. Whether the team’s structural is reasonable can impact the firm performance (FP) directly. Therefore, the establishment of an efficient TMT is greatly important to the development of the company. Currently, more and more scholars are concerned about TMT, the force of these researches are mainly on the relationship between single member’s characteristics and FP, however, the influence to FP is mainly though the TMT’s characteristics. Therefore, there is limitation in the current researches. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between the TMT’s structural features and FP.Basing on the current theoretical and empirical research, this paper will study the relationship between the TMT’s structural features and FP from4dimensions:age structural, tenure structural, education structural and professional background structural. In addition, we argue that the pay gap will do impact the influence of some structural to FP, and this phenomenon can be explained by "tournament theory" and "behavior theory". In this paper, using the data from113Chinese listed companies in IT industry, we study empirically how the structure of TMT influences firm performance.The results show that:(1) the average age, tenure and major heterogeneities of members in TMT have positive effects on FP, while tenure of members has negative effects on FP;(2) high pay gap strengthen the influence of tenure heterogeneities to FP, while high pay gap weaken the influence of major heterogeneities to FP;(3) the education, age and education heterogeneities have no effect on FP。And this article will have a detailed analysis and discussion about the result above.