Boone, C., Van Olffen, W. and Van Witteloostuijn, A. (1998). Psychological team make-up as a determinant of economic firm performance: An experimental study Journal of Economic Psychology, 19(1):43--73.

The majority of economic theories of the firm, particularly industrial organization (IO), tend to treat decision makers as abstract depersonalized profit-maximizers, as humans without flesh and blood. The present study attempts to explore the economic consequences of human variation by examining a key aspect of internal organization, the features of a firm's top management team (TMT), in relation to organizational performance in a competitive context. Specifically, we will analyze the effects of different team compositions with regard to a well-established psychological trait, namely locus of control (). There exists an impressive amount of past research into the effects of leaders' and individuals' locus of control in decision making and leadership situations. From this, hypotheses are derived as to the relative performance of teams that are predominantly internal, predominantly external or mixed with regard to their members' perceptions of control. We include the impact of environmental dynamism as an interaction variable affecting the relationship between team composition and firm performance. The study was carried out in the experimental setting of an elaborate multinational business game. Results show that the findings on the performance implications of locus of control at the individual level of analysis are valid at the group level as well, which points to interesting avenues for future research. Moreover, the findings suggest the potential fruitfulness of cross-fertilizing insights from organization theory and IO.PsycINFO classification: 2300; 3020; 3120; 3640; 3660.