Matching Managers to Strategy: An Investigation of Performance Implications and Boundary Conditions

This paper explores a series of relationships between top managers, strategic direction and financial performance. Building on previous studies, it was hypothesised that: (a) firms pursuing different strategies would be led by managers with different profiles; and, (b) firms which aligned the profiles of their top managers with the requirements of their strategies would outperform those that did not achieve such alignment. Further the importance of the strategymanager alignment under various environmental and organisational constraints was also investigated. The results of the empirical examination of a sample of U.S. companies from three industries suggest that matching managers to strategy is a significant component of superior performance.