The CEO alone versus the entire Top Management Team: Their Differential Impact on Organizational Change

This paper has presented a conceptual framework for studying the differential impact that CEO alone, versus the entire TMT, may have on organizational change. We believe that it would be possible to test the framework proposed, although significant methodological challenges remain in the gathering of data about the internal dynamics of the CEO and the rest of the TMT. For example, much of the past research on leadership has been flawed by the lack of a consistent definition for a CEO. To simply study presidents or chairman, as is often done by succession researchers, is to examine a mixture of CEO' sand non-CEO's, since titles are sometime ambiguous (Fredrickson, Hambrick, & Baumrin, 1988). This problem is only compounded when attempting to identify members of the TMT. Historically the TMT has referred to all other officers representing a dominant coalition of a organization's most influential members (Thompson, 1967). As expected, this rather broad definition has been subject to much interpretation. For example, Galbraith defines the TMT as "the chairman, president, those vice presidents with important staff or departmental responsibility, occupants of other major staff positions and, perhaps, division or department heads not included above (1967, p. 84)." Still others define the TMT as all corporate officers who also serve on the board of directors (Finkelstein, 1988).