The Effects of CEO National Culture and Top Management Team National Cultural Diversity on Strategic Choices, Firm Performance, and Executive Compensa

An investigation into the effects of national culture on strategic decision making and decision-making processes in multicultural teams, involving the use of quantitative methods to assess whether top executive teams perform better and are more likely to engage in certain strategic approaches when the balance of cultural values (measured using Hofstede's data) differs, with attention paid to variables such as the levels of intra-group conflict in culturally diverse teams and the extent to which these teams have managerial discretion to affect outcomes. The research is also interested in the effects of cultural values on top executives' compensation packages and the structure of these, for example whether more individualistic managers tend to have higher rates of performance-contingent pay and whether CEOs with high power distance have a greater earnings discrepancy with the next highest paid executive. The research focuses on a number of gaps in the existing literature, proposing an integration of Hambrick and Mason's (1984) Upper Echelons Theory and Hofstede's (1980) theory of cultural values in order to answer new questions about the effects of top executives' national backgrounds on a range of organisational outcomes (e.g. performance, strategic choices, executive compensation). It is also proposed to study decision-making in multicultural teams more generally by using qualitative and experimental methods to observe decision-making processes and behaviours in instances where the exact cultural values of participants (as measured by values surveys) are known.