Leadership: Leaders, Followers, Environments

Top managers

Failure to recruit and retain high-performing top management teams is significantly associated with leader derailment.¹⁸ The term top management team refers to a relatively small group of the most influential organizational executives. This includes the president or CEO as well as those vice presidents and other executives reporting directly to the top executive. To the head of an organization, the characteristics and abilities of such a group of high executives is very important because they have a direct impact on organizational performance and therefore on the success of the leader. Stability in such groups, as well as efficiency and productivity, reflects well on the leader and the organization.

Interest in top managers among students of organizations has varied over the last few decades. It has ranged from considering a company’s top executives as the principal, or even the only, determiners of performance to treating top managers as side players, perhaps with important roles, but who are quite interchangeable.¹⁹ The prevailing research approach has been to focus on the top executive while largely neglecting the other pieces, though this seems to be changing. More study on the relationships and interactions between and among the top executives would be very helpful to managers and students of organizations precisely because such top managers usually have a significant impact on group outcomes.

The concept of top management groups applies to many types of organizations, ...