Top Management Team Socialization and Consistency in a Firm's Strategic Decision Process

Japanese firms have been at the forefront in emphasizing intensive socialization as a key ingredient in organizational performance. Further, because of their continued success, socialization has received greater interest within academia. Much of this community shares the belief that organizational socialization is positively associated with organizational performance. One reason, writers have suggested, is because socialization offers a mechanism for maintaining stable and consistent decision processes (Pascale, 1985). Yet, there have been few, if any, empirical assessments of the relationship between socialization and the degree of consistency in a firms' decision processes. This study was an attempt to fill that gap in the literature. By doing so, we found that socialization, as reflected by TMT agreement, was positively associated with the degree of consistency in a firm's strategic decision process.