China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), China
Top management team (TMT) behavioral integration is crucial for firms to adapt to environmental shifts. Prior research has tended to focus on relatively distal, static, or overly generic determinants of behavioral integration and generated equivocal implications. Our knowledge of how to foster behavioral integration in top teams remains limited as the relational dynamics underpinning this interaction-based collective competence have been underexplored. We conducted a longitudinal inductive field study to understand how behavioral integration was fostered at three local firms in China’s fast-growing market. Our study reveals how the CEO’s affective grooming, in parallel to cognitive-behavioral teaching, helps develop behavioral integration by fostering affective accountability, diffused affective gratitude, and context-specific knowledge acquisition among top executives. Affective grooming refers to a pattern of emotion management actions to initiate, sustain, and give feedback on executives’ learning process. Our study contributes to upper echelons theory by highlighting the affective-relational dynamic of grooming. In uncovering the emotions and emotion management mechanisms that foster behavioral integration, our study illuminates the relational black box of upper echelons research.
