The Impact Of Top Management Team Heterogeneity On Firm Performance

As one of China’s major economic industries,manufacturing has an important position in the development of market economy.Over the past few decades,China has become more and more developed,and it has gradually developed into a world-class level.Companies that are constantly changing in the manufacturing market environment are beginning to seek economic transformation.With the development of the Internet,some traditional manufacturing companies began to make certain strategic adjustments according to their actual business conditions and the external environment to adapt to external needs.This will help improve firm performance and promote business development.For a company,human resources are an integral part of it.The top management team is both a strategic decision maker and an executor who needs to make the most powerful strategic planning based on a changing environment to maximize firm performance.According to the Upper Echelons Theory,in a top management team,because people with different background characteristics have different sensitivity to the external environment and cognitive angles,it will affect the formulation of corporate strategy and thus affect performance.Based on this,the paper studies the relationship between top management team heterogeneity and strategic change and performance.In 1984,Hambrick and Mason have proposed the theory of Upper Echelons,arguing that managers as limited rational people,their different characteristics will have an impact on strategic changes and firm performance.Subsequently,many scholars and experts focused their attention on the relationship between top management team characteristics and firm performance.Because the conclusions of the two studies have been different in the past,scholars have begun to consider whether the relationship between top management team heterogeneity and firm performance is affected by other factors.In view of the theory of Upper Echelons and strategic change,the strategic change of the company is closely related to the top management team,and the strategic change also affects the firm performance.Therefore,this paper adds strategic change as a mediating role.At the same time,since strategic change is a strategic behavior formulated by companies under the influence of environmental changes,we add environmental uncertainty as a regulatory variable in this paper to study whether the impact of strategic change on performance will be regulated by environmental uncertainty.This paper selects 540 Shenzhen-Shanghai A-share listed manufacturing companies for 6 consecutive years(2011-2016)as samples,using Stata 15.0 analysis software to empirically study the heterogeneity of top management team and the regression analysis of panel data.The impact of firm performance and the role of strategic change in the intermediation of top management team heterogeneity and firm performance and the adjustment of environmental uncertainty to strategic change and firm performance are as follows:(1)The age heterogeneity of top management team and the heterogeneity of the professional background will negatively affect the firm performance.(2)Educational background heterogeneity and professional background heterogeneity will negatively affect strategic change.(3)Strategic change positively affects firm performance.(4)Environmental uncertainty positively adjusts the relationship between strategic change and firm performance.