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.