Perceived Environmental Dynamism, Relative Competitive Performance, and Top Management Team Heterogeneity: Examining Correlates of Upper Echelons’ Advice-Seeking

Advice-seeking is one of the most basic practices in making real-life decisions and has been shown to be a predominant mode of knowledge acquisition at the upper echelons level. Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) in particular seek advice to obtain formulated judgments, opinions, and suggestions about current strategic directions and recommended alternatives for future courses of action. In this study we distinguish between intra-organizational and extra-organizational sources of advice and examine how factors at the environmental, firm, and top management team (TMT) level relate to patterns of CEO advice-seeking. We develop and test hypotheses linking perceived environmental dynamism, relative competitive firm performance, and TMT heterogeneity to CEO advice-seeking from internal and external sources and uncover asymmetric patterns. We discuss implications for upper echelons theory and strategic decision-making research.