ABSTRACT
Top-management teams face, social, and political complexities that create coordination and environmental demands. To cope with these demands, the team must concurrently develop some minimal level of internal process skills and manage political behaviour. Higher the technical, social, and political complexity, the greater the need for top members to work together, and therefore the higher the interdependence. The traditional social psychology paradigm, coupled with the external perspective, provides a means to model successful processes during evolutionary and convergent periods. Traditional social psychology focuses on activities within the group's boundaries. Cross-boundary transactions cluster into activity sets. Task coordinator activities are aimed at getting specific technical information and coordinating work interdependence with outsiders. Top teams that have not developed either the internal process for dealing with high levels of conflict, uncertainty, and change; or the external processes to monitor, model, influence, and mold the external and organizational environment, may not be able to acquire the requisite skills in the time available.
