The purpose of this study is to examine the relative contributions of the CEO and other (non-CEO) top management team members to firm performance. Using data from ExecuComp, we analyze 2,687 CEOs and 11,501 other top management team (TMT) members, by industry, during the period 2004–2017 using variance decomposition methods. We find that other TMT member effects are important but are smaller than CEO effects. We also find that the effect of new TMT members appointed by the CEO on firm performance is larger than the effect of continuing TMT members and that this differential effect on performance increases with CEO tenure.
