Knowledge diversity between a firm's groups of inventors enables recombinatory search for innovation. Yet, such diversity remains rather useless unless it is actively exchanged among inventor groups. Inventor groups, however, tend to specialize by engaging in so-called perspective-making activities, that is, in intra-group knowledge exchange and specialization. This makes them increasingly unable to communicate and understand other inventor groups and creates a risk of incommensurability, which attenuates a firm's effectiveness in its recombination for innovation. Here, we draw on transformational leadership theory to understand how TMTs are enabled to motivate and inspire their inventor groups to share information and knowledge, to mitigate incommensurability risks. For a TMT to act as an effective transformational leader, information is key, and their ability to send, receive, and process information is shaped, following classic organization theory, by their structural attributes. Hence, we study three key TMT structural attributes that underlie its information-processing capacity: Hierarchical structure, functional structure, and administrative intensity. Based on a longitudinal dataset that includes 124 pharmaceutical firms, 2815 top managers, and 34,203 inventors, we show that the positive relation between inventor group knowledge diversity and innovation performance strengthens with a functional structure yet weakens with administrative intensity. We contribute to the literature with its emphasis on how TMT compositional characteristics influence its cognitive processes and decision-making on innovation, by studying how TMT structural characteristics shape its information-processing capacity to be effective as transformational leaders in motivating and inspiring inventor groups to engage in perspective-taking and overcome incommensurability.

公司发明者群体之间的知识多样性使得创新的重组搜索成为可能。然而，除非发明人群体之间积极交换，否则这种多样性仍然毫无用处。然而，发明家群体倾向于通过参与所谓的观点形成活动来实现专业化，即群体内的知识交流和专业化。这使得他们越来越无法沟通和理解其他发明人群体，并产生不可通约的风险，从而削弱了公司重组创新的有效性。在这里，我们利用变革型领导理论来了解TMT如何激励和启发其发明者群体共享信息和知识，以减轻不可通约风险。对于 TMT 来说，要成为有效的变革型领导者，信息是关键，按照经典组织理论，他们发送、接收和处理信息的能力是由其结构属性决定的。因此，我们研究TMT信息处理能力的三个关键结构属性：层级结构、职能结构和管理强度。基于包含 124 家制药公司、2815 名高层管理人员和 34,203 名发明人的纵向数据集，我们发现发明人群体知识多样性与创新绩效之间的正相关关系随着职能结构的增加而增强，但随着管理强度的增加而减弱。我们通过研究 TMT 结构特征如何塑造其信息处理能力，以有效地作为变革型领导者来激励和启发发明人群体参与，从而为文献做出贡献，重点是 TMT 组成特征如何影响其认知过程和创新决策。换位思考并克服不可通约性。