To appear in J. Carroll (ed.) Applied Social Psychological

forthcoming. 2This is the-competitive age. Today, global economies and rapid technological change pose the major challenges to corporations. To meet these challenges most of us look to the top echelons of our corporations to map the route to a promising economic future. It is the top management team whose primary task it is to align the organization with its external environment in order to assure survival, profit, and growth. It is the top management team that is held accountable for the strategy and performance of the firm (Tushman & Virany, 1986). Consequently, as competitive pressures mount and business failures increase, industry becomes more and more interested in management team processes that will lead to success. This paper focuses on the process by which top management team members go about their task, and the link between this process and performance. The push for the study of top management teams comes from academe as well as industry. There has been a demand for research to model the role of the top team in organizational evolution (Tushman & Virany, 1986), in mediating the relationship between team composition and firm performance (Hambrick & Mason, 1984), and in the collection and dissemination of strategic information (Dutton & Duncan, 1987). Although much of the research on top teams concentrates on the link between group demography and performance, diverse sources have called for more exploration of executive team processes. Social psychology with its long tradition of analyzing the interactions among group members provides a partial framework for examining these processe