The Positive Research On The Relationship Between The Background Characteristics Of Top Management And Company Performance

Many scholars’studies about top management began to change from research on a single member into research on the top management team since the1980s. In1984, Hambrick and Mason first extended the related concept of demographic (age, sex, experience, education and characteristics) to the research on the relationship between the top management team and corporate strategy, this means the beginning of the research on the relationship between background characteristics of the top management and the company performance. From then on, the effects of the characteristics of top management on the company performance have become a core research topic. Outstanding top management team is one of the rarest and most valuable resources in a company, it’s a strategic resource and it is of great importance for companies to build competitive advantage and improve performance.Chinese society is now in the process of transforming, therefore, the present market economy environment is very different from the perfect economic system in the West. In Chinese special environment, the effects of top management on the company performance are worth further researching. The research will provide some suggestions for the development of the listed company and help them complete the transition successfully.Manufacturing industry belongs to the second largest industry in China; it’s a national pillar industry. Manufacturing industry is the main force in the process of economic transformation. In resent years, the growth and development of Chinese manufacturing industry is pretty amazing, however, there is still a wild gap compared to the developed countries. The overall situation of Chinese manufacturing industry is big but not strong, thus, manufacturing is a very good perspective when we research the relationship between the characteristics of top management and performance.This paper selects Shanghai A-share companies as the research object and applies a method combining theoretical analysis and empirical study to research the relationship between the background characteristics of top management and company performance. There is seven parts in this paper.The first part is an introduction of the research background and significance, the framework and the method of this study.The second part reviews the relevant literature about the concept of top management and the effects of top management’s characteristics on company performance so as to get some enlightenment from the current research results.The third part lays the theoretical foundation of this paper. It first deals with the relevant definitions, and then introduces the basic theories on the relationship between top management characteristics and company performance, there are mainly three theories:entrepreneur theory, human capital theory, upper echelons theory.The fourth part is the theoretical analysis section, detailed analysis of the mechanism of the relationship between top management characteristics and company performance, research hypotheses and the specific content of the relationship, which lays solid theoretical foundation of empirical research.The fifth part is empirical design. Based on the previous analysis, this part puts forward the hypotheses of this study, then selects appropriate variables and builds the index system, correspondingly constructs the empirical model.The sixth part carries out the empirical tests and presents the testing results, using SPSS19.0to investigate the relationship between top management characteristics and company performance.The last part is conclusions and suggestions, mainly concludes this research and offers some relevant suggestions accordingly.There are two possible contributions in this paper. First one is research perspective, domestic academic research on the relationship between top management characteristics and company performance mostly based on the real estate industry and SMEs, and especially the research on manufacturing in recent three years is still black, consequently, this paper selects manufacturing company as the research object. Secondly, the selection of the index about the top management characteristics is more comprehensive, this paper chooses the age, sex, education background, politics background, overseas background and term as the representative characteristics of top management, studies these variables’ homogeneity and heterogeneity.