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The purpose of this paper is to advance spatial studies of change interventions by conceptualizing them as liminal spaces and examining how these spaces are conceived, perceived and lived during the intervention process.

The paper explores change interventions as liminal spaces in the empirical context of LEGO serious play workshops through participant observations and interviews.

The study shows that in change interventions an abstract, conceived liminal space is created, maintained and closed down to enable the planned change to take place. While practicing the space, the change participants may indeed perceive this space as liminal, but the space is less manageable because of their both prescribed and unprescribed interpretations. Furthermore, as subjectively experienced, the space may hold a spectrum of liminal, liminoid and everyday (business as usual) notions.

The study contributes to the research on (1) the spatiality of change interventions and (2) artificially created liminal spaces of organizing.

The paper reminds consultants and organizations embarking on change interventions to pay attention to the spatiality of such interventions. The study shows that it is not enough to plan how these spaces are to be used, but also it is equally important to consider how the participants use and experience them.

The study provides a novel insight into change interventions by examining them as liminal spaces that are simultaneously conceived, perceived and lived during the intervention process.

Prior studies have shown that heterogeneity plays a crucial role in addressing soft issues linked to a firm’s corporate social responsibility stance. The purpose of this paper is to extend the prior literature on the effect of gender heterogeneity on environmental, social and economic performance dimensions, specifically, whether the female boardroom presence weakens or strengthens the performance along the three dimensions, commonly referred to as the corporate sustainability.

The study from a positivist philosophy adopts a quantitative approach, and the final sample consisted of forty-six companies listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange for the year 2011–2018. The final sample was a balanced panel of 344 firm years. The dependent variables were return on assets (ROA), environmental performance (ENV) and donations made for social causes (SOP). The ENV was measured using a content scoring system, with range of 1 to 5. The data were analysed using the fixed effects and GLM regression models. To further address the issue of endogeneity, a two-stage least squares regression was conducted.

The findings show a positive relationship between gender heterogeneity and ROA, which was also confirmed for the environmental performance index. However, the sign reversed in the SOP model and showed a negative relationship between gender heterogeneity and donations, the proxy for SOP. The results are in tandem with the stakeholder axioms that argue that commitment to other stakeholder groups strengthens firm performance in the long run.

An implication of this study is the fact that information availability has been rapidly escalating in the country, leading to rising social movements and civic unrest; therefore, corporations that face negative castigations may pay the huge price of product boycott and loss of market value.

The findings of this study provide additional insight into the influence of female boardroom presence on the environmental, social and economic performance of firms. The findings suggest the relevance of the resource dependence theory, especially from a developing country context, to ensure an improved corporate governance structure in Nigerian manufacturing firms.

To demonstrate transparency and accountability, the three boards in this study are required to meet in public in front of an audience, although the boards reserve confidential issues for discussion in private sessions. This study examines boardroom public accountability, contrasting it with accountability in board meetings held in private. The study adopts Erving Goffman's impression management theory to interpret divergences between boardroom behaviour in public and private, or “frontstage” and “backstage” in Goffman's terminology.

The research observes and video-records three board meetings for each of the three boards (nine board meetings), in public and private. The research operationalises accountability in terms of director-manager question-and-answer interactions.

In the presence of an audience of local stakeholders, the boards employ impression management techniques to demonstrate accountability, by creating the impression that non-executive directors are performing challenge and managers are providing satisfactory answers. Thus, they “save the show” in Goffman terms. These techniques enable board members and managers to navigate the interface between demonstrating the required good governance and the competence of the organisations and their managers, while not revealing issues that could tarnish their image and concern the stakeholders. The boards need to demonstrate to the audience that “matters are what they appear to be”, even if they are not. The research identifies behaviour consistent with impression management to manage this complexity. The authors conclude that regulatory objectives have not met their transparency aspirations.

For the first time, the research studies the effect of transparency regulations (“sunshine” laws) on the behaviour of boards of directors meeting in public. The study contributes to the embryonic literature based on video-taped board meetings to access the “black box” of the boardroom, which permits a study of impression management at board meetings not previously possible. This study extends prior impression management theory by identifying eleven impression management techniques that non-executive directors and managers use and which are unique to a boardroom context.

This study aims to provide a comparative portrait of the profile of men and women in the boardrooms of listed companies (Euronext Lisbon, Portugal) during the first stage of the gender quota law, by comparing the profile of those board members appointed before the mandated quota law and those appointed after it. This study also seeks to contribute to a critical review of the main reservations expressed by some core institutional actors, who initially voiced their concern that it might be difficult to find women in equal conditions to men in terms of their cumulative experience and qualifications to serve as board members.

In addition to providing a comparative descriptive analysis of male and female board members’ profiles before and after the mandated gender quota law, an aggregate professional endowments measure (professional endowments Index) is also calculated.

The research findings show that, in the first stage of the quota law, men and women appointed as board members after the mandated gender quota law are fundamentally similar in their professional attributes, forming a more homogeneous boardroom than those holding board positions before it.

This study contributes to the literature on the profile of the men and women serving on the publicly listed company boards in Portugal, by comparing their profiles before and after the mandated gender quota law. This study also fills a gap in the literature, as studies about gender quotas and corporate boards relating to Portugal and Southern European countries in general are still relatively scant. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study carried out into the gender quota law on corporate boards in Portugal.

Boards presently are considered the most critical component in improving corporate governance (CG). Board diversity is increasingly being recommended as a tool for enhancing firm performance. Academic research and regulatory action regarding board diversity are focussed mainly on gender and ethnic composition of boards. However, the perspective of board members on board diversity and its impact is mostly missing. Moreover, while strategic leadership perspective suggests that a broader set of upper echelon’s characteristics may shape their actions, empirical evidence investigating the impact of less-explored attributes of diversity is almost non-existent. While the research on the input–output relationship between board diversity and firm performance remains equivocal, an intervening relationship between board diversity and board effectiveness needs to be understood. The purpose of this paper is to address all three limitations and explore the subject from board members’ perspective.

The paper presents the findings of qualitative, exploratory research conducted by interviewing 42 board members of FTSE 350 companies. The data are analysed thematically.

The findings of the research suggest that board members of FTSE 350 companies consider the diversity of functional experience to be a critical requirement for boards’ role-effectiveness. Functionally diverse boards manage external dependencies more effectively and challenge assumptions of the executive more efficiently, thus improving CG. The findings significantly contribute to the literature on board diversity, as well as to strategic leadership theory and other applicable theories. The research is conducted with a relatively small but elite and difficult to approach set of 42 board members of FTSE 350 companies.

The paper makes a unique and significant contribution to praxis by presenting the perspective of practitioners of CG – board members. The findings may encourage board nomination committees to seek board diversity beyond the gender and ethnic characteristics of directors. The findings may also be relevant for policy formulation, as they indicate that functionally diverse boards have improved effectiveness in a range of board roles.

Board diversity is about building a board that accurately reflects the make-up of the population and stakeholders of the society where the company operates. The aim of board diversity is to cultivate a broad range of attributes and perspectives that reflects real-world demographics as boards need to continue to earn their “licence to operate in society” as organisations have a responsibility to multiple constituents and stakeholders, including the community and the wider society within which they exist. Building social capital through diversity has value in the wider context of modern society and achieving social justice.

The paper makes an original and unique contribution to strategic leadership theory by strengthening the argument of the theory. The paper explores beyond widely researched attributes of gender and ethnicity on boards and explores the impact of a less-researched characteristic of directors – their functional experience. Moreover, the paper opens the “black box” of CG – boards, and presents the perspectives of board members. The findings indicate that board members in FTSE 350 boards define diversity more broadly than academics and regulatory agencies often do.

The purpose of this study is to examine how companies integrate cyber risk into their enterprise risk management practices. Data breaches have become commonplace, with thousands occurring each year, and some costing hundreds of millions of dollars. Consequently, cyber risk has become one of the gravest risks facing organizations, and has attracted boardroom-level attention. On the other hand, companies already manage many kinds of difficult and growing risks, and that firms lose less than 1% of annual revenues as a result of cyber incidents. Therefore, how should firms appropriately address cyber risk? Is it indeed a materially different kind of risk area, or is it simply just one more risk that can seamlessly be integrated into existing enterprise risk management (ERM) practices?

The authors performed thematic analysis based on semi-structured interviews, with non-probabilistic, purposive sampling, to answer two main questions. First, how do firms manage enterprise risks, generally? And second, how are they integrating cyber risk into these existing processes?

The authors find that there is considerable variation in the approach and sophistication in ERM practices, such as whether they are driven more like an auditing function, or as a risk champion. The authors also find that despite the novelty of cyber risk, it can be integrated like other enterprise risks, and that cyber risk is most often seen as an operational risk (similar to workplace accidents or fraud), rather than a strategic risk, emerging from, for example, technology innovation and R&D.

The generalization of the results is limited by the sample size and variation of firms interviewed. While the authors attempted to interview enterprise risk managers across a wide variation of firms, there were clear limitations in the scope. That being said, the authors were fortunate to be able to examine ERM and cyber risk practices across small and large, private and publicly traded companies, from a variety of business sectors.

The authors believe these finding are important because they present evidence that while cyber risk may be new, it does not require specialized handling or processes to track it at the enterprise level. While some firms may choose to provide special accommodations or attention because of their data collection or business practices, this approach is neither necessary nor required of all firms in all situations.

This research is one of the only papers that, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, examines how cyber risk is integrated at an enterprise level.

This study investigates the relationship between board gender diversity (BGD) and the time to Initial Public Offering (IPO), which stands as an entrepreneurially risky choice, particularly challenging in family firms. We also investigate the moderating role of family ownership dispersion (FOD).

We draw on an integrated theoretical framework bringing together the upper echelons theory and the socio-emotional wealth (SEW) perspective and on hand-collected data on a sample of Italian family IPOs that occurred in the period 2000–2020. We employ ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and alternative model estimations to test our hypotheses.

BGD positively affects the time to IPO, thus, it increases the time required to go public. FOD negatively moderates this relationship. Our findings remain robust with different measures for BGD, FOD, and family business definition as well as with different econometric models.

The article develops literature on family firms and IPO and it enriches the academic debate about gender and IPOs in family firms. It adds to studies addressing the determinants of the time to IPO by incorporating gender diversity and the FOD into the discussion. Finally, it contributes to research on women and outcomes in family firms.

This paper aims to present a comprehensive theoretical framework that seeks to explore the impact of cultural, legal and social factors within the external environment on the relationship between women on corporate boards and firm performance. By investigating these boundary conditions, the paper aims to shed light on how these pressures influence the aforementioned relationship.

To build the sample of companies, the authors selected companies listed on the stock exchanges of countries that represent a diverse range of institutional contexts. These contexts encompass countries with individualistic cultures, collectivist cultures, environments with mandatory gender quotas, environments without gender quotas, contexts with substantial progress toward gender equality and contexts with limited progress in achieving gender equality. To test the hypotheses, the authors used linear regression analysis as a primary analytical approach. Furthermore, they used the propensity score matching technique to address potential issues of reverse causality and unobserved heterogeneity.

The findings indicate that the positive influence of a critical mass of women on corporate boards on firm performance is contingent upon the institutional context. Specifically, the authors observed that this relationship is strengthened in institutional contexts characterized by an individualistic culture, whereas it is not as pronounced in collectivist cultural contexts. Furthermore, this research provides compelling evidence that the presence of a critical mass of women on boards leads to enhanced firm performance in institutional settings where gender quotas are not binding, as opposed to settings where such quotas are enforced. Lastly, the results demonstrate that the presence of a critical mass of women on boards is associated with improved firm performance in institutional settings characterized by low progress in achieving gender equality. However, the authors did not observe the same effect in institutional contexts that have made significant strides toward gender equality.

This research offers a unique perspective by investigating the relationship between women’s presence on corporate boards and firm performance across different institutional contexts. In this investigation, the authors recognize that gender diversity on corporate boards is not a one-size-fits-all solution and that its effects can be shaped by the unique institutional contexts in which companies operate.