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Given prior limited research on boards in clean-tech enterprises, we investigate what constitutes an effective board exploring in-depth: who the board members are, what roles they perform and how these roles are performed.

Our study is an inductive, multiple case study of five clean-tech enterprises established in Norway.

We find that board composition in terms of complementary resources that the top management team lacks added by outside directors, their increased engagement in the board service role and board behavioural integration are important constituents of board effectiveness, which in turn translates into the increased levels of the firm’s strategic action capabilities, both action speed and breadth.

We suggest that these three constituents (prevalence of outside directors, board service role engagement and board behavioural integration) together make up the board contribution, which is most valued by clean-tech enterprises in the earliest stages of their development. Future research could be conducted in other types of high-tech start-ups and/or in other hybrid social enterprises to strengthen the generalizability of our findings.

While the mainstream governance research focuses on for-profit boards in large established companies, our study adds to the research on non-for-profit governance and boards in clean-tech enterprises that are both small entrepreneurial and hybrid social enterprises.

The Canadian mutual fund setting is unique in that two governance mechanisms – corporate and trust – coexist. This study empirically examines the impact of each mechanism on fund fees and performance. We find that corporate class funds charge higher fees but deliver superior fee-adjusted returns than trust funds. We then analyze the impact of various board characteristics on fees and performance for corporate class funds. We find that a board with smaller size, CEO duality, and a higher percentage of independent directors is more likely to charge lower fees. In addition, smaller boards are strongly associated with higher fee-adjusted performance. Our study supports agency theory over stewardship theory and provides valuable guidelines for Canadian investors and regulatory agencies.

The chapter aims to analyse the influence of the board of directors on transparency and integrity in hybrid organisations like state-owned enterprises. The effect of several characteristics of directors on the board’s effectiveness was assessed. The empirical analysis was based on 60 Italian listed and non-listed state-owned enterprises. Each enterprise’s website was individually examined and coded to obtain two self-constructed indexes on transparency and integrity, and a regression model was created to test the hypotheses.

The ‘knowledge structure’ of interlocking directors and board compensation were found to be both positively related to the level of commitment among state-owned enterprises to transparency and integrity. Skill and gender diversity on the board had no significant impact. The analysis used data from a one-year period but dealt with hidden and complex phenomena like corruption. Future longitudinal studies and qualitative approaches would provide more comprehensive insights into the relationship between the board of directors, transparency and integrity over time.

Policymakers and all those involved in the appointment of directors to state-owned enterprises should be aware that some features of board members may affect the levels of organisational transparency and integrity. The chapter contributes to the literature on governance of state-owned enterprises, emphasising the board’s role and its effectiveness in sustaining transparency and integrity.

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.

Recent literature on nonprofit boards of directors has extensively investigated the composition, role, responsibilities, and characteristics of boards. Given the growing number of studies on nonprofit boards, which added new impulse to the debate on the role and characteristics of these players, it is time to analyze the state of the art and systematize the current knowledge. On the other hand, despite the presence of some literature reviews, a research comparing the debate among the nonprofit, private, and public sectors is still lacking. Using Gabrielsson and Huse’s (2004) framework, we wanted to identify factors that can influence research on nonprofit boards and compare our results with existing studies on private and public sector.

We conduct a systematic literature review, selecting empirical articles published in international scientific journals from 1992 to 2012.

We found similarities and differences in relation to research on boards among sectors. As a common result, we found that evolutionary studies still remains a neglected area in all of three realms. Finally, whereas input–output studies prevail in the private sector and contingency studies prevail in the public sector, behavioral studies prevail in the nonprofit sector, demonstrating, also, that the sector itself can make a difference in the board’s research.

This literature review provides some suggestion for further research on boards for all of three sectors. For example, we suggest complementing research on boards on all three sectors, especially in relation to evolutionary studies.

This paper fills the need to clarify the status of research on nonprofit boards, in order to address scholars in the understanding of the phenomenon.

This study uses cross-border mergers as a test of the ability of foreign directors to provide effective strategic advising. We find that firms with foreign directors on their boards are more likely to engage in cross-border mergers, pursue a higher number of cross-border mergers, and invest more in those mergers. We further determine that firms with foreign directors are more likely to undertake nondiversifying mergers, enjoy friendly mergers, and acquire privately held targets. Moreover, we find that firms with foreign directors have higher announcement period returns and pay less for their cross-border targets.

Purpose – Starting from public and corporate governance literature, the chapter aims to evidence the opportunity in exploring board of directors in public organisations, where the focus is on a behavioural perspective.Design/methodology/approach – Presenting two levels of analysis: (a) the relationship between the board and ‘external’ stakeholders, and (b) the relationship between the board and managers, a framework is proposed evidencing which factors (variables, constructs and concepts) logically should be considered as part of the explanation of boards’ role in public organisations’ innovation.Findings – The chapter provides support for a board model in public governance, evidencing both the opportunity to assume a multi-paradigm perspective and the existing similarities and differences between boards in public and corporate governance approach. It is possible, for example, to empirically apply the framework both to different national context and to different levels of public organisations.Originality/value of chapter – The chapter presents theoretical perspectives on governance research, and both some pioneer studies in public sector research and some of the major contribution in corporate governance studies. All of them have been put together, introducing a new stream of research in the debate on the micro (organisational) level of governance in public sector.

Recent accounting literature and Agency theory have predicted that corporate governance assists the convergence of interests between shareholders and managers, and thus enhances the quality of financial reporting. This chapter discusses some of the empirical studies on corporate governance in Saudi Arabia; it also elaborates on the corporate governance regulations introduced by Capital Market Authority in Saudi Arabia. Studies cover various subjects that interact with corporate governance, such as earnings management, corporate social responsibility disclosure, ownership structure, environmental disclosure and voluntary disclosure in annual reports of Saudi's listed firms. It also discusses the effectiveness and determinants of corporate governance structures, such as the board of directors, audit committee and other sub-committees. Results were generally in line with previous research from the developed countries, but sometimes there are contradictions, and these results have been discussed and explained, and implications to regulators and investors are drawn where possible.

Purpose – The relationship between the board characteristics (i.e. board independence, CEO duality, board size, board meeting and board tenure) and the ownership structure (i.e. managerial ownership, family ownership and institutional ownership) and earnings quality is examined.

Design/methodology/approach – Data from 280 non-financial companies listed on Bursa Malaysia's Main Board for the year 2004 is used.

Findings – Significant association was found between board tenure and earnings quality. In addition, a positive significant association was found between outside board ownership and family ownership and earnings quality. However no significant relationship was found between board of directors’ independence and earnings quality.

Research limitations/implications – The association between audit committees’ characteristics and earnings quality was not examined. An examination of the impact of ownership structure on boards of directors and audit committees is warranted. An investigation of the impact of the ownership structure on earnings quality in Malaysia using separate test on family-controlled and non-family-controlled firms is suggested.

Practical implications – The appropriateness of policy directives requiring majority independent directors may be considered by policy makers.

Originality/value – The conflict of interest between outside shareholders and managers in a diffused ownership support the agency theory. However, utility of agency theory to explain the conflicts between the controlling owners and the minority shareholders where ownership concentration is prevalent is limited. Whilst demonstrating the dominant impact of ownership structure on earnings quality in Malaysia the study calls for alternative explanations of corporate governance practices in different institutional settings.

Governance can often be assessed as one part of directing companies’ action toward something better. This study examines how governance quality at the country level and firm level can affect sustainability performance that aligns with sustainable development goals (SDG). Prior academic literature explains that if a country has a low institutional condition, it is a great challenge to implement sustainability. However, the internal awareness of the company to implement sustainability plays an important role as well. To examine the research question, this study uses the banking sector as a research sample with an observation period from 2017 to 2019. Prior literature overlooks research in the banking sector and does not feature country-level governance with firm-level governance. The data were collected either from the annual report or sustainability report, which comprises 141 companies, with the total observation of 423 firm-year. This study used panel data regression analysis and was based on the Hausman Test; it shows that random effect is used to test the hypothesis. This research finds that good quality governance at the country level, results in good sustainability performance. However, contrary to expectations regarding the quality of firm-level governance, which is thought to be positively related to sustainability performance, this study found a negative relationship. The argument that might answer the finding is the existence of governance conditions at the state level and at the firm level that mutually subsidize each other. This research contributes to policymakers continuing to provide counseling and improve institutional conditions to motivate companies to support the achievement of the SDGs. Companies should also pay attention to the effectiveness of their internal governance and strive to use stakeholder opinions as a guide in the realization of SDGs.