Yan Ling

Ambidexterity and Performance in Small-to Medium-Sized Firms: The Pivotal Role of Top Management Team Behavioral Integration:

While a firm’s ability to jointly pursue both an exploitative and exploratory orientation has been posited as having positive performance effects, little is currently known about the antecedents and consequences of such ambidexterity in small-to medium-sized firms (SMEs). To that end, this study focuses on the pivotal role of top management team (TMT) behavioral integration in facilitating the processing of disparate demands essential to attaining ambidexterity in SMEs. Then, to address the bottom-line importance of an ambidextrous orientation, the study hypothesizes its association with relative firm performance. Multisource survey data, including CEOs and TMT members from 139 SMEs, provide support for both hypotheses.

The Effects of Family Firm Specific Sources of TMT Diversity: The Moderating Role of Information Exchange Frequency

We examine the relationships among three family firm specific sources of top management team (TMT) diversity (the generation in charge of the family firm, the number of family employees, and the number of employed generations) and family firm performance. By integrating upper-echelons and team process research, we hypothesize that these TMT diversity sources interact with information exchange frequency among TMT members to affect family firm performance. Multisource survey data with lagged performance measurement, including CEOs and TMT members from 86 family firms, support our hypotheses. We discuss the implications of our findings and develop avenues for future research.

The impact of transformational CEOs on the performance of small- to medium-sized firms: does organizational context matter?

Although theory suggests that CEOs who engage in transformational leadership should have a positive effect on firm performance, most empirical examinations using data drawn from larger firms have failed to find support for this linkage. Given that the organizational complexity associated with larger firms has been viewed as a central obstacle to establishing this important link, the authors examined the impact of CEO transformational leadership on firm performance in smaller, privately held firms. After first explaining why the less complex context of these firms provides a setting for transformational CEOs to play a more direct role in enhancing firm performance, they then further clarified the nature of this link by hypothesizing 3 contingencies that they argued are particularly salient: firm size, CEO founder status (founder or nonfounder), and CEO tenure. Results from a multisource survey of CEOs and their top management teams in 121 firms and 2 time-lagged measures of performance, 1 objective and 1 perceived, provided consistent support for these hypotheses.