09.Power and Glory Concentrated Power in Top Management Teams.pdf

/ Organization Studies /content/28/8/1197 The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/0170840607075674 2007 28: 1197Organization Studies Henrich R. Greve and Hitoshi Mitsuhashi Power and Glory: Concentrated Power in Top Management Teams Published by: On behalf of: European Group for Organizational Studies can be found at:Organization StudiesAdditional services and information for /cgi/alertsEmail Alerts: /subscriptionsSubscriptions: /journalsReprints.navReprints: /journalsPermissions.navPermissions: /content/28/8/1197.refs.htmlCitations: What is This? - Jul 5, 2007Version of Record at National Library of China on October 6, 2011Downloaded from Power and Glory: Concentrated Power in Top Management Teams Henrich R. Greve and Hitoshi Mitsuhashi Abstract Strategic change is one of the most critical decisions that organizations make. We focus on the role of groups at the upper echelon of hierarchies and propose that concentrated power either in the CEO or the top management team is prone to be exercised, leading to a high rate of strategic change. We derive hypotheses on how formal and informal power concentration in top management teams have an effect on changes in corporate diversifi- cation. The findings suggest that power concentration strongly affects decision making. Keywords: power, decision making, organizational change, top management teams The strategic choice perspective in organizational theory sought to spur an inter- est in how organizational leaders use power and politics to influence organiza- tional choices within the limits imposed by their context (Child 1972). Its key assumption of managerial choice has been incorporated in various theories of strategic behaviour, and perhaps most prominently in the upper echelon approach to studying strategic change (Hambrick and Mason 1984). Although this perspective maintains that top managers influence the rate and type of change in organiz