UPPER ECHELONS THEORY REVISITED: THE NEED FOR A CHANGE FROM CAUSAL DESCRIPTION TO CASUAL EXPLANATION

This paper presents a review of the past and present upper echelons research with the intention of drawing attention to the need for a change of direction from causal descriptive studies to causal explanatory studies. Review of the extant literature indicates that many of the organizational researchers have shown greater interest in studying relationships between top management characteristics (in the form of demographics) and organizational outcomes. This has continued despite the effort by Priem, Douglas and Gregory to draw attention to the limitations of demographic proxies of psychographic variables of top management teams and the caution that the role of the entire top management team in strategy development may be over-exaggerated. Since many of the studies failed to show empirically how or why top management demographics related to organizational outcomes, implications for theory and research are discussed. 1. BACKGROUND There is some reason to believe that organizations parallel the profile of the dominant individuals who manage the affairs of the organization and that some organizational pathologies may reflect pathologies in the personality of these dominant individuals. Their perceptions of the corporate environment can be said to determine to a large extent how organizations or business units act in response to their environment. Thus, the organizations are what their leaders think, feel, perceive, and believe. This was the thesis of the seminal paper by Hambrick and Mason (1984), known as the Upper Echelons (UE) perspective