As organizations expand globally, the spatial distribution of top management teams (TMTs) across regions becomes increasingly prevalent. This paper aims to review the diverse literature on the geographic dimensions of teams (collocation, dispersion, and virtuality), and more specifically, the spatial configuration of upper echelons. Several studies explore the composition of TMTs, the diversity of their members, and their influence on firms’ strategic choices. However, the international location of TMT members remains largely overlooked. We conduct a systematic literature review that draws on spatial theory and the upper echelons approach. The results allow the development of a conceptual framework that integrates research related to the spatial dimensions of TMTs. The purpose is to contribute to a better understanding of how the spatial configuration of TMTs influences strategic leadership processes in geographically dispersed organizational contexts. We discuss the implications of this spatial perspective of upper echelons and propose potential avenues for future research.

While digital product innovation offers unprecedented opportunities for incumbent firms to create competitive advantages, its fluid and iterative nature presents distinctive cognitive challenges. There is limited empirical literature explaining the role of constructive cognitive characteristics of executives in differentiating the successful pursuit of digital product innovation. Drawing on upper echelons theory and the attention-based view, we examine how chief executive officer (CEO) cognitive flexibility enables incumbent firms to pursue digital product innovation. Through a mixed-methods approach combining a field survey of 178 machine-building firms and a scenario-based experiment with 134 participants, we demonstrate that CEOs with higher cognitive flexibility achieve superior digital product innovation outcomes by facilitating insightful information acquisition and processing. This relationship is strengthened when CEOs engage in more boundary spanning activities and when firms possess greater social capital. Our study contributes to strategic leadership research by demonstrating how CEO cognitive flexibility enables incumbent firms to navigate the cognitive demands of digital product innovation, while enriching our understanding of how adaptive attention patterns shape strategic adaptation in increasingly digitized environments.

Board of directors (BOD) bring valuable human and relational capital to firms but may act as self-interested agents by design. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the compensation of BOD members in high-technology sectors affects overall firm performance. We tested our specific hypotheses using panel regression methodology on data gathered from the CRSP, Compustat, BoardEx, and ExecuComp databases. Our final sample consisted of 9,127 firm years, and the companies in our sample were all high-tech publicly traded U.S. firms from 1992 to 2019. Our results showed that there is an association between BOD’s pay structure and firm performance (accounting-based return on assets and market-based Tobin’s Q). Our findings demonstrate originality and contribute to the literature since we empirically demonstrate that the level of variable BOD pay has a diminishing effect on return on assets and Tobin’s Q. This study advances our knowledge of executive compensation in the high technology sector.