Top Management Team Diversity and Foreign Market Performance at ICEAlion Group

Abstract

The capacity of an organization to make quality decision is dependent upon the available choice of decision makers. The top management team in an organization ,acts as the critical decision making body and it thus follows that the quality of the decision made is a representation of the characteristics of the management team. The influence of top management team diversity at ICEALION group was the objective of the study which was to be determined. The specific constructs of diversity that was researched on were functional, gender, cultural and educational diversity. To realize the objective of the study, a case study research design was adopted, with the primary data being collected using an interview guide from four targeted interviewees, namely; the managers in Marketing, Claims, Human Resources (HR) and Corporate Services. The collected data was analyzed using the content analysis method in order to facilitate deeper understanding of common themes that were shared by the interviewees. The study came up with the findings on the specific constructs of diversity of this research. Functional diversity made communication and teamwork in decision making better. To achieve this the organization endeavored to improve on individual employee competencies through training and development programs. The gender diversity of the top management team resulted in a decision making body that is adaptable and versatile to address the ever-changing customer preferences and competitive pressures. On the other hand, cultural diversity was found to lead to improved identification and mitigation of risks in the foreign market, while the educational diversity helped in bringing together diverse skills and perspectives during decision making process and this was equally associated with how a firm performs in a foreign market.