My Campaign to Influence How CEOs Lead Their Top Management Teams: A Partial Success Story

This essay, invited as one of Academy of Management Perspectives’s relevance reviews, details my campaign to influence how chief executive officers (CEOs) lead their top management teams (TMTs). My efforts initially arose from insights I garnered from field interviews with numerous CEOs regarding the challenges they had with their TMTs. The most prominent challenge, noted by several CEOs, was “TMT fragmentation,” or the relative absence of mutual and collective interaction among a firm’s senior executives. I report on how I leveraged that finding into theoretical and empirical research on the concept of “TMT behavioral integration,” and, in turn, how I attempted to inform CEOs about how they might improve the dynamics of their TMTs. I describe the elements of that campaign and its successes, as well as the factors that caused those successes to be less than complete. I conclude with a slate of remaining unanswered questions regarding TMT dynamics. Throughout, I aim to encourage management scholars to enhance the quantity and quality of their interactions with practitioners.