The Effect Of High-tech Listed Companies' TMT Professional Diversity On Firms' Explorative Innovation Behavior

From the aspects of Upper Echelon theory, Top Management Team is decision center of enterprise. When making decisions, TMT members process, decode and analyze information based on their values, experience and characteristics, so to some degree, organization as a reflection of its top managers. TMT diversity helps team members to escape from mind paradigm and explore new solutions. Researches from cognitive lens prove the positive relationship between TMT diversity and organization innovation. From social lens, researchers found negative relationship between TMT diversity and organization innovation for splitting sub-groups. In order to understand the opposite results, researchers of this paper try to combine social and cognitive lens to interpret effect of TMT diversity on innovation and moderating role of team behavior integration.This study empirically examines the effect of TMT professional diversity on firms' explorative innovation behavior, using data of 198 Chinese listed companies from pharmaceutical and telecommunication industries between 2003 to 2012. The findings suggest that(1) professional diversity of high-tech companies' TMT can effectively promotes explorative innovation behavior;(2) comparing with internal CEO, the effect of professional diversity on explorative innovation may be weaker in the TMT lead by external CEO;(3) Ownership concentration can strengthen the positive relationship between TMT professional diversity and explorative innovation.This paper settled the confusion from social lens and cognitive lens results, responded to theoretical issues of Upper Echelons and choose exploration lens to analysis rather than traditional resource or social network aspects. Research results support Upper Echelon Theory. On the other hand, this paper offers a micro view to understand organization decision process.