Empirical Research On The Impacts Of Top Management Team Faultlines On Growth Performance Of The Entrepreneurial Firms

Systematic exploration of the determinants of the sustainable growth of entrepreneurial firms has always been the core issue of strategic management research.According to upper echelons theory,the characteristics of the top management team affect top managers' social cognition,and then affect their analysis and judgment of the strategic problems faced by the firms,which will eventually affect the development of the firms.In order to scientifically evaluate the impact of the heterogeneous composition of top management team on firm performance,based on the concept of team faultlines,scholars began to explore the relationship between top management team faultlines and firm performance from the level of strategic and organization.But until now,prior studies mainly discussed the linear relationship between top management team faultlines and firm performance,and have yielded inconsistent findings,because the prior studies ignored the possible non-linear relationship between them.In addition,prior studies often regard the top management team members as the subject with equal power,and neglect that CEOs are the decision-making subject with the highest power in top management team,which led to few stuedies whose aims are to investigate the moderating effect of CEO-TMT interface level on the relationship between the top management team faultlines and firm performance are found.Given this,this paper employed the data on Chinese entrepreneurial firms during the period from 2011 to 2018 to empirically analyze the impacts of top management team faultlines on firms growth performance,and the moderating effects of CEO-TMT interface on the above relationship.Research results show that top management team information-based faultlines as well as bio-demographic faultlines have inverted U-shaped relationship with firm growth performance.Simultaneously,CEO-TMT interface has significant moderating role on the relationship between top management team faultlines and firm growth performance.Specifically,the higher of the CEO-TMT relational interface as well as CEO-TMT informational interface lever is,the more obvious the inverted U-shaped relationship between them is;while the higher of the CEO-TMT socialization experience interface lever is,the weaker the inverted U-shaped relationship between them is.The conclusion of this study could provide some valuable reference for entrepreneurial firms to scientifically understand the characteristics of top management team faultlines that is conducive to boost the growth performance,and the moderating role of CEO-TMT interface,and some management insights and practical ideas for the construction and optimization of the top management team,and the sustainable development of the entrepreneurial firms.