Who’s in charge here? A bibliometric analysis of upper echelons research

Abstract

Upper Echelons Theory (UET) has become a dominant paradigm within organization sciences. However, despite scholarly desire to situate this literature within a cohesive framework, UET has instead branched off into a variety of niche literature streams.Qualitative reviews have struggled to ascertain the boundaries of UET, due to its lack of conceptual clarity. Consequently, it is unclear whether UET is a coherent literature faithful to its seminal authors, or one that is growing in ways that are untenable. We seek to better understand the UET literature stream by applying a bibliometric study to quantitatively survey the extant literature. We examine recent upward and downward trends and highlight what we believe are the most promising areas for future UET scholarship. Ultimately, we find that UET continues to grow expeditiously but is progressively becoming more theoretically insular and that methods are progressively becoming less proximal to firm leaders.