Top Management Team Diversity and Financial Performance Across Bavarian and Czech Manufacturing Firms
BTHA-AP-2025-37
Top Management Teams Diversity, Non-Financial Reporting and Financial Performance Across Bavarian and Czech Manufacturing Firms.
2025
Contact: doc. Emil Velinov
The project, carried out in cooperation between Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt and University of Chemistry and Technology Prague, focuses on the relationship between top management team diversity, non-financial reporting, and the financial performance of manufacturing companies in Bavaria and the Czech Republic.
The research is based on the Upper Echelons Theory, which assumes that strategic decisions and organizational outcomes are significantly influenced by the personal and demographic characteristics of top executives. The project particularly examines the impact of age, gender representation, and educational background within top management teams on company financial performance.
The joint Czech-German research team conducts an extensive literature review covering more than 50 academic studies indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases. Based on this analysis, the project identifies key research areas related to age diversity, nationality diversity, and educational diversity within top management teams.
The empirical part of the project uses data from the Orbis / Bureau van Dijk database and includes manufacturing companies classified under NAICS 31–33 with headquarters in Bavaria and the Czech Republic. The dataset contains information about boards of directors and senior management teams, including variables related to age, gender representation, academic titles, net results, ROCE, total assets, and leverage.
The findings reveal significant structural differences between the two regions. While women represent approximately 24.5% of top management positions in Bavarian firms, the share in the Czech sample reaches only 14.6%. Statistical analyses, however, do not confirm a significant direct impact of the analyzed diversity indicators on short-term financial performance. Leverage appears to be one of the strongest predictors of firm performance across the analyzed companies.
The project includes joint workshops in Prague and Ingolstadt, where the research team defines the methodology, distributes work packages, and coordinates further research activities. The Czech team primarily focuses on the theoretical framework and literature review, while the German team is responsible for data collection and empirical analysis.
