The IB AR special issue on Top Management Tearns (TMTs) is presented to disseminate current theoretical and empirical advances in TMT research, increase understanding of the problems and opportunities of TMT research, and to stimulate future research on TMTs. Our focus in this forum is to explore issues concerning TMT composition, process, leadership, incentives and structure as they relate to organisational performance. In our introduction we argue that the TMT should be a focal point of study for Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) researchers interested in the determinants of organisational performance. The resource based view of the firm is suggested as a paradigm to introduce the TMT to the SHRM-performance debate. We then present a framework to integrate research on TMTs with SHRM and introduce the papers which constitute the special issue. Research on strategic human resource management (SHRM) has increasingly focused on issues surrounding organisational performance. Ever since Devanna, Fombrun and Tichy (1984) argued that human resource management has strategic implications, researchers have sought out empirical support for the links between HRM and organisational performance. Almost simultaneously, the term ‘top management team’ (TMT) became pervasive in the organisational behaviour and strategy literature (Hambrick, 1994). In view of the fact that both the SHRM and the strategy research domains share a common interest in the contribution of human resources to securing competitive advantage one would expect that the top management team would feature prominently in the SHRM research agenda on the determinants of organisational performance.This has not been the case. Although top management teams have become a focus for research in strategic management (c.f., Hambrick, 1989), TMTs have largely been bypassed in the strategic human resource management debate concerning the link between SHRM and the performance of the firm. This is partly due to the preoccupation of SHRM researchers with the impact of personnel policies and practices upon the commitment and productivity of lower echelon employees. While these policies and practices are enacted and activated by top management teams, the SHRM research tradition largely ignores the TMT as a strategic human resource in itself. Additionally SHRM typically takes strategy as a ‘given’ and is relatively unconcerned with the determinants of strategy itself. Implicit in the SHRM perspective is the argument that the tangible and intangible skills and abilities of employees and their motivations are central to the firm ’s sustainable competitive advantage (Flood and Olian, 1995:7-18). As personnel policies and practices encourage skill formation and utilisation it behoves SHRM researchers to examine and establish the link between these policies and practices and organisational performance. While this focus has driven a rich stream of research focusing on the organisational arrangements of work systems, reward systems, manpower flow systems and ‘voice’ mechanisms (Femie and Metcalf 1994; Guest, 1995;Huselid, 1995) andtheir links to various indicators of organisational performance, the top management team has not been considered a separately identifiable strategic human resource, resulting in a dearth of research on HR practices at the TMT level.Y et, the top management team is the group of ‘ employees ’ within the organisation best placed to have an impact upon the fate of the firm. Irrespective of industry, senior managers deliberate upon strategic issues concerning product portfolios, pricing, marketing, financing and production, all of which are central to both the short and long run economic performance of the enterprise. The perceptual biases, values and behaviours of the TMT will undoubtedly influence the decisions made, which in turn, affect the fate of the enterprise. As TMT behaviour and ultimately decision outcomes are shaped at least in part by those personnel policies and practices that pertain to the executive level, the time is ripe for SHRM researchers to extend their focus to the TMT. There appear to be three primary reasons why SHRM researchers interested in linking human resource management arrangements to organisational performance have neglected TMTs: (i) The relative ignorance of many HRM scholars of the literature on strategic management (ii) The difficulty in obtaining access to Top Management Teams, and the reluctance of many HRM researchers to use secondary data sources; and (iii) The lack of a paradigm attractive to HRM scholars that identifies top management teams as human resources in and of themselves.