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Board characteristics and firm innovation: a qualitative comparative analysis

Yexin Liu (School of Economics and Management, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin, China) (School of Economics and Management, Harbin Institute of Technology at Weihai, Weihai, China)
Ziqing Zhou (School of Economics and Management, Harbin Institute of Technology at Weihai, Weihai, China)
Weiwei Wu (School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China)

Management Decision

ISSN: 0025-1747

Article publication date: 30 September 2024

120

Abstract

Purpose

Although the literature has highlighted that a firm’s board is critical for firm innovation, the impact of board characteristics on firm innovation has always been examined separately, leading to inconclusive research results. Based on the complexity theory, this paper incorporates four board characteristics, including board size, board ownership, board independence and CEO duality, to examine the impact of the combinations of different board characteristics on firm innovation through qualitative comparative analysis.

Design/methodology/approach

Using the panel data of listed manufacturing firms in China from 2007 to 2022, this paper conducted the fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to test the proposed hypotheses.

Findings

The research results show that no single board characteristic can explain firm innovation, as board size, board ownership, board independence and CEO duality can lead to either positive or negative firm innovation. Moreover, firm innovation depends on a complex combination of board characteristics.

Originality/value

This paper makes the following contributions: Firstly, this paper advances the firm innovation literature by extending the role of board characteristics on firm innovation, thereby offering a new way to model firm innovation in terms of board characteristics. Secondly, this paper provides a more comprehensive account of the role of a firm’s board by integrating agency theory and resource dependence theory. Thirdly, this paper also identifies a promising avenue for further research in the field of corporate governance: the investigation of other contingency contexts in which the effect of board characteristics may be observed, with the aim of further increasing the understanding of board functioning.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, grant number 72072047 and 72472039; Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province, grant number ZR2023QG010; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, grant number HIT.HSS.202324.

Citation

Liu, Y., Zhou, Z. and Wu, W. (2024), "Board characteristics and firm innovation: a qualitative comparative analysis", Management Decision, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/MD-06-2023-1067

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2024, Emerald Publishing Limited

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