Cognitive diversity of top management teams as a competence-based driver of innovation capability

Abstract

In order to gain and maintain innovation capability, organizations have to adapt their profiles and processes to perpetually changing environmental conditions. However, the resulting need for a high degree of flexibility, which includes avoiding an information undersupply by being stable but inflexible, entails the risk of an information overload. Therefore, a balance between an organization's flexibility and its stability is needed. Top Management Team (TMT) cognitive diversity seems to constitute a promising resource, which under certain circumstances can be turned into an organizational competence, allowing for a high but stable level of organizational flexibility. Employing insights from complexity theory and adopting agent-based simulation is suggested as a further research method in order to deduce underlying causal interrelations.