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Abstract
Since Hambrick and Mason's (1984) seminal piece on executive teams, the interest in such teams has given birth to a number of models explaining what they do and how to improve their effectiveness. This paper examines five popular executive team models and provides an OD practitioner's perspective on how the models have proven useful in the field, what elements they may be overemphasizing, andhighlight areas in which more development may be needed.
Keywords: executive teams, effectiveness, models, decision-making
Hambrick et al. (1996) trace theoretical interest in executive teams back to March and Simon's (1958) behavioural theory of the firm as well as Cyert and March's (1963) theory of the "dominant coalition." However, it is Hambrick himself who is widely recognized as having sparked a wave of research on executive teams in the 1980s with his seminal piece on the topic written with colleague P.A. Mason (Hambrick & Mason, 1984).
Since then, the interest in executive teams-the senior executive group sitting atop an organization which some also call the senior leadership team-has given birth to a number of models explaining what they do and how to improve their effectiveness, although these are less numerous than models for non-executive teams (see Mathieu, Maynard, Rapp, & Gilson [2008] for a review of these models). This may be explained by the restricted access researchers have to executive teams, particularly those in publicly-traded companies, who seldom want anyone eavesdropping on their strategic discussions. Another reason may be that senior executives are not confident their teams are run effectively and are not keen for outsiders to observe this. No matter the reasons for it, restricted access may explain why "so much idealized imagery, prescriptive folklore, and naïve attributions exist about top executives" (Finkelstein, Hambrick, & Cannella, 2009, p.41) and why closer examination of executive team models is warranted.
The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the more popular executive team models from an OD practitioner's perspective. To achieve our purpose, the first section of this paper presents an overview of these models. In the second section, we set out their similarities and differences. In the final section, we provide a practitioner's perspective on how the models have proven useful in the field, what elements they overemphasize,...