Strategic Orientation and Upper Echelon Characteristics.

Abstract

Every organization reflects the background of its most powerful top managers and what the organization does and the way it carries out its functions, could be explained, in part at least, by the profile of its upper-echelon. The relationship between the strategic orientation of three tobacco companies and the proportion of executives recruited from outside the company and the proportion of executives from different functional backgrounds in the upper echelon of the companies is the focus of this paper.