The Effect of Team Composition on Strategic Sensemaking

Top management teams constantly need to deal with changes in their environment, for instance changing customer demand, social environments, or supplier situations. They try to understand how these changes can affect their organization and adapt their organizational strategy. But teams differ in the ways they make sense of their environment and accordingly in the decisions they make and the success they have.

Tanja Prinzessin zu Waldeck analyzes the effects of the composition of top management teams on their strategic sensemaking process. Based on the results of ten case studies, she shows that the diversity of experiences of team members supports the team to pick up strategically relevant environmental changes early and to develop a wide range of strategic alternatives. The author also indicates that the diversity of a team does not affect the speed with which teams come up with strategic decisions, but that speed appears to be influenced more by the personalities, leadership style, and culture in a top management team. Furthermore, she implies that family and state-controlled businesses are more likely to experience problems in their team composition than public ones.

Autorentext
Dr. Tanja Prinzessin zu Waldeck promovierte bei Prof. Dr. Utz Schäffer am Lehrstuhl für Controlling der European Business School, Oestrich-Winkel. Sie war fünf Jahre als Beraterin bei McKinsey & Company tätig. Seit Mai 2007 hat sie sich mit NetMoms.de selbständig gemacht einer Internetplattform für Mütter.

Zusammenfassung
Foreword Starting point of Tanja Prinzessin zu Waldeck's dissertation thesis is the insight in the relevance of strategic sensemaking in top management teams. Consequently, Prinz- sin zu Waldeck investigates how the composition of the team may influence the cor- sponding activities. Different from previous research, her study takes a broader - proach in two respects. First, it describes top management teams more compreh- sively. Instead of focusing only on demographics such as age, tenure, or functional backgrounds, it also explores the personalities of the team members, the leadership style and team culture. In this context, it transfers knowledge from other research fields such as psychology to sensemaking research. Second, the study does not only concentrate on specific sensemaking activities, for instance scanning or information sharing, but tries to draw a more holistic picture of the sensemaking process. Finally, the study controls for the effects of the organizational context. It explores how varying the organizational size, involvement of owners in the management of an organization and ownership status changes the findings about the team composition and its effect on sensemaking. As a result, the work of Prinzessin zu Waldeck offers several interesting new insights and at least three substantial contributions to the relevant literature: It offers new ideas about how the composition of top management teams affects the strategic sensemaking of teams differently. It furthermore provides evidence that organizational factors might influence the composition of teams and consequently also their sensemaking.

Inhalt
The Cognitive Theory of Strategic Sensemaking.- Empirical Research on Strategic Sensemaking of Top Management Teams.- Research Design.- Ten Management Teams and Their Strategic Sensemaking.- Propositions on Strategic Sensemaking of Top Management Teams.- Implications and Outlook.