Search results

The purpose of this article is to investigate how ownership structure, especially family and/or venture‐capital involvement, as well as entrepreneurial activities, defined as strategic change and renewal, help explain the involvement of independent members on boards of directors. The CEOs of 2,455 small and medium‐sized, private enterprises from practically all industries were contacted in a telephone survey, resulting in an exceptionally high response rate. The findings reveal that family firms are more reluctant to involve independent directors on their boards than non‐family firms, that presence of venture capitalists increases the frequency of independent board members and that ownership has an impact on board roles. The results do not support the hypothesised relationship that independent directors enhance entrepreneurial activities. One implication of our study is that the often‐argued‐for strategic contribution of outsiders to the boards in family firms may be overemphasised. Another implication is that family firms that choose to acquire additional capital should be aware that this could result in a change in the board composition and the loss of control of the business. However, new and external owners' inclusion on the board seems to be negotiable since there are also venture capitalists that do not insist on board representation.

The literature considers three main models of nonprofit sector structure and development: liberal, welfare partnership, and social democratic. This study analyzes the cases of Italian and Canadian nonprofit organizations (NPOs) that operate in two third-sector contexts, widely known as “hybrids.” In particular, we aim to verify whether some features of governance, leadership, and volunteer participation have impacts on the financial performances of selected Italian and Canadian NPOs.

Differences between the two studied nonprofit contexts influenced the sampling, the data collection, and the methods of analysis. Data on Italian and Canadian NPOs are analyzed both together and separately, using multiple regression models. Revenues, fund-raising and other grants from the general public, and program expenses are used as measurements of financial performance.

Our analysis demonstrates that some board characteristics, as well as volunteer participation and representation on the board, have impacts on the nonprofit financial performance. The characteristics of the CEO studied in this work are not significantly associated with the level of financial performance.

This study has several important implications for research on board characteristics, CEO characteristics and volunteer management and governance, as well as implications for practitioners. The limitations of this study are related mostly to the different methods used for sampling NPOs and collecting data in the two different country contexts due to the different level of availability of data.

The past literature has not adequately examined the relationships among the board and CEO characteristics, the role of volunteers in governance and financial performance.

As founders of First Interstate BancSystem, which held $8.6 billion in assets and had recently become a public company, and Padlock Ranch, which had over 11,000 head of cattle, the Scott family had to think carefully about business and family governance. Now entering its fifth generation, the family had over 80 shareholders across the US. In early 2016, the nine-member Scott Family Council (FC) and other family and business leaders considered the effectiveness of the Family Governance Leadership Development Initiative launched two years earlier. The initiative's aim was to ensure a pipeline of capable family leaders for the business boards, two foundation boards, and FC.

Seven family members had self-nominated for governance roles in mid-2015. As part of the development initiative, each was undergoing a leadership development process that included rigorous assessment and creation of a comprehensive development plan. As the nominees made their way through the process and other family members considered nominating themselves for future development, questions remained around several interrelated areas, including how to foster family engagement with governance roles while guarding against damaging competition among members; how to manage possible conflicts of interest around dual employee and governance roles; and how to extend the development process to governance for the foundations and FC. The FC considered how best to answer these and other questions, and whether the answers indicated the need to modify the fledgling initiative.

This case illustrates the challenges multigenerational family-owned enterprises face in developing governance leaders within the family. It serves as a good example of governance for a large group of cousins within a multienterprise portfolio. Students can learn and apply insights from this valuable illustration of family values, vision, and mission statement.

The purpose of this study is to show that social relations in a corporate governance platform between members of supervisory boards and between members of supervisory and executive board tiers can serve as an alternative viewpoint for understanding mechanisms of social selection in corporate governance networks. The study shows that through the lenses of social network analysis, it is possible to identify and understand how the process of corporate governance member selection unfolds within companies and how that selection process may have been potentially influenced by the cross-board relations, such as interlocking directorships.

To estimate network parameters and attribute effects of network tie emergence, this study has used exponential random graph models (ERGMs) on corporate governance data of Danish publicly listed companies. Econometric models are applied to estimate parameter statistics which serve further to explain tendencies of tie emergence.

The results of this study reveal that the process of selection of both supervisory boards and executive directors is interdependent. Also, the study showed that board members are more likely to select popular supervisory board members and top managers who have their expertise gained through multiple companies affiliated with multiple industries. However, these conditions for CEO selection apply only to the extent to which they have their experience gained from multiple companies but not multiple industries.

On one hand, this study demonstrates that being a dynamic practitioner who is exposed to diverse corporate environments by being affiliated with different companies belonging to different industries generally increases practitioners visibility in the corporate governance network, and therefore their attractiveness to boards of directors. On the other hand, the results show that the research on board assemblage, nowadays, should be rather observed through the methodology of social network analysis as the method gives an opportunity to understand structures through relations, from which the executive tier should not be exempted as well.

This study aims to investigate the effect of the diversity of the board of directors (BOD) and the shariah supervisory board (SSB) on credit risk, insolvency, operations, reputation, rate of deposit return risk (RDRR) and equity-based financing risk (EBFR) of Islamic banks (IB).

The study uses 68 IBs from 19 countries covering 2009 to 2019. BOD and SSB diversity attributes data were hand-collected from the annual reports. Financial data were collected from the bankscope database. The robustness test and two-step system generalized method of moment estimation technique were used to address potential endogeneity issues.

This study provides evidence that diversity in the experience and cross-membership of board members decreases the risk. Gender diversity increases the risk, but the BOD’s education level diversity has no relationship with risk. More interestingly, influences in the experience and cross-membership of the SSB’s members positively influence risk. However, members’ education levels and gender diversity have not been proven to affect risk.

The paper recommends that Islamic banking authorities play a stronger role and make a greater effort in driving corporate governance reform. Also, determining individual characteristics of the board is a requirement to become a member of a BOD or an SSB.

This paper expands the commitment literature through the diversity of the BOD’s and the SSB’s members in terms of their education levels, experience, cross-membership and gender. This study expands the list of potential risks for IBs, by including the RDRR and EBFR.

How do families-in-business deal with intergenerational female succession in their company’s corporate governance structures, i.e., the board of directors? How is female boardroom capital built up? This chapter explores the boardroom immersion processes and mentorship programs followed by 44 Mexican and Spanish next-gen women owners of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation, privately-owned, national and international firms, who were appointed for the first time to their family business’ board of directors between 2005 and 2020.

Our outcomes show that intergenerational female corporate governance succession is driven more by particular families-in-business matters, like the inheritance of ownership rights, than by corporate governance codes or soft legislation. We discovered that next-generation women owners are more likely to be appointed for the first time to their family business boardroom when they’re between ages of 38 and 47. Ninety percent (90%) of them will be appointed at or before 57. Our findings also reveal that 4th generation female owners are immersed in the boardroom at a younger age.

When analyzing the immersion processes, we noticed too that due to limited business socialization during their upbringing, some of these well-­educated, professionally qualified females had to cope with holding legal ownership (potestas) in the family firm but missing business decision-making legitimacy (auctoritas) in the governance structure. Based on our results, we developed a families-in-business female boardroom capital development framework to help them achieve both: potestas and auctoritas, as well as to facilitate next-generation women owners’ boardroom incorporation in family enterprises.

Diversity in boards has gained attention as a reflection of societal imbalances. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of diversity in terms of both gender and nationality in management boards of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on firm performance from an upper echelons perspective. The authors also examine how board-specific characteristics influence the structural makeup of boards in gender and nationality diversity terms.

The authors focus on the UK because of its individualistic society and flexible labour market and assess 309 SMEs in the manufacturing industry over 2009–2019. A 3-stage least squares (3SLS) estimator is used to analyse the data, the Shannon index to measure board diversity, return on assets as proxy for firm performance, and owner-manager presence, board member age and tenure are the board-specific characteristics of primary interest.

Both gender and nationality diversity contribute to firm performance and represent distinct upper echelon characteristics that change the cognitive and psychological dynamics of boards. Firms with larger boards do not perform better, but diverse boards reduce the narrowing view of CEOs. Yet the presence of owner-managers, despite their performance-enhancing contribution, holds firms back from benefitting from diversity as a strategic choice.

This study extends the upper echelons theory to include board diversity as an important aspect that should become more central in upper echelon thinking when understanding firm performance. The authors’ findings suggest that theoretical developments in search of understanding firm behaviour must proceed by accounting for diversity and not simply focusing on decision-making styles.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the level of online disclosure of firms in the USA and to evaluate the impact of diversity in terms of director nationality (boardroom internationalisation) on online disclosure.

The authors apply, for the first time, a new modified scoring system to measure online disclosure levels by securing more detailed information on each of the items in the voluntary disclosure index. Regarding the percentage of foreign board members, unlike in previous research, the authors calculate two additional proxies to more accurately specify the level of international diversity on the board: the Blau Index and the Shannon Index. Moreover, the authors use a cross-sectional model for the sampled non-financial S&P500 firms using both ordinary least squares (OLS) and heteroskedasticity-corrected estimates to analyse the impact of boardroom internationalisation on the level of online disclosure.

The findings reveal that the average online disclosure level for the sample in question is 64% for the 0–1 index and 57% for the 0–4 index. In addition, the results of the regression analysis confirm the study’s proposed hypothesis, which is that the presence of international board members correlates with an improvement in the level of online disclosure. This can be attributed to the fact that foreign directors bring unique skills and knowledge from their home countries and thus, increase board discussion, creativity and innovation, which has a positive impact on the level of online disclosure.

Financial firms are subject to capital requirement regulations; consequently, disclosure practices can be influenced. Therefore, these firms were excluded from the sample of the study.

This research contributes to the body of literature on nationality diversity of firm boards and corporate online disclosure in several respects. Firstly, the study adds an international dimension to the existing literature. Secondly, this study provides new evidence that foreign diversity on the board can improve firm value, insofar as the corresponding enhancement of online disclosure leading to positive capital market implications. Thirdly, the authors use, for the first time, a new scoring system approach to measure the level of online disclosure. Finally, it contributes to the corporate governance literature by basing its analysis on a multi-theoretical approach.

This study aims to focus on the accountability of organizations to multiple stakeholders with differing interests and power, where there is an absence of accountability towards shareholders.

Longitudinal field study via participant‐observation.

The study focuses on the relations between the subsidiary and the parent boards and how a governance improvement plan affected the internal dynamics of the organization and helped to clarify the demands of multiple stakeholders. A stakeholder‐agency model is developed which emphasises the role of governance, the importance of structure and process, and the culture or ethos of boards in which multiple stakeholders may have compatible rather than competing interests.

The paper focuses on the quasi‐public sector and develops stakeholder‐agency theory by identifying governance at the centre of differing relationships with stakeholders with unequal salience where there is both an economic concern with efficiency and a broader social concern.