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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.

This study examines the director labor market to better understand which director attributes are important for board service.

Director level data, which includes proxies for both human and social capital, is analyzed to determine which characteristics increase the likelihood of gaining additional board appointments.

We find that general skills and director connections are valued in the marketplace. Among specific director characteristics, financial expertise, holding an MBA degree, and S&P 500 experience are positively associated with gaining new board appointments. Moreover, regardless of the director’s level of expertise, highly connected individuals are more likely to obtain new appointments. Finally, from a range of characteristics, only director connections mitigate the negative consequences of serving on the boards of firms that restate their financials.

While most research has analyzed the effectiveness of boards of directors as a whole, this study examines the value of individual director characteristics within the context of the labor market.

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.

Board size has received significant attention among researchers and regulators. However, the advisory role of boards has not been studied much. In this study I examine the notion that investors value larger boards for their advisory capabilities. Prior studies examine board size in the context of monitoring role of corporate boards and find opposite effects on debt holders and equity holders. Using market-based measures of total firm performance, which take both equity and debt into account; I find that larger boards are associated with greater economic value added (EVA). Using a sample of S&P 1500 firms from 2000 to 2003 and controlling for various firm and industry characteristics, I also find that the board size is positively associated with firm productivity and various other efficiency measures such as return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE) and Sales-Turnover ratio. I argue that firms with larger boards, valuing the advisory role of directors offer greater compensation to the directors. Overall the results indicate that large board size has a positive impact on firm's performance. The results are robust to alternative measures of firm performance and other key variables.

Corporate governance research suggests that board structure can impact organizational outcomes such as financial performance and executive remuneration. Agency theory posits that a board composed of independent directors and chaired by an independent chairperson can provide effective control over agency costs, while stewardship theory suggests that effective decision-making is facilitated when the board is chaired by the CEO and majority of directors are from the executive team. Empirical research into the association between board structure and performance in Jordan has provided mixed results, with no consensus supporting either theory. This study takes a different approach to researching the assumed association between board structure and performance by surveying directors’ perspectives on such assumed relationship between financial performance and four of boards’ characteristics (i.e., board independence, CEO duality, board size, and female ratio on board). Findings of this research indicate that Jordanian directors perceive a medium to strong association between financial performance and each of board independence, independent chair of board, and female ratio on board. However, directors of Jordanian boards perceive no association between financial performance and board size.

In recent years, increasing scholarly attention has been directed towards the field of governing bodies research. However, little attention has been paid to the behavioural perspective on studying public boards. Aiming to fulfil this gap this paper offers a review of the international literature addressing boards behaviour within the unique organizational setting of public sector.

Considering as behavioural studies those publications focusing on actors, processes, decision-making, relationships and interaction inside and outside the boardroom, 91 papers were analysed. Adopting the framework provided by Huse (2007), the papers are classified following four behavioural dimensions/blocks which are crucial to understand board dynamics: board members, interactions, structures and leadership, decision-making culture.

The literature review shows the increasing production – in the last years – on the theoretical issues related to the behavioural perspective in public governance literature. The most relevant part of these contributions addresses the theoretical dimensions of the board member’s characteristics and of structural leadership.

The manuscript reveals the need to adopt a more organizational approach for studying the behavioural categories and levels of analysis proposed by public governance literature. Moreover, the article evidences some possible directions for future research that might further contribute to enrich the ‘behavioural governance perspective’ in public organizations.

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 focuses on the personal characteristics of top executives in companies involved in corporate financial crime as well as the introduction of human governance as one of the mechanisms in preventing corporate misbehaviour. This chapter discusses directors’ and top management teams’ personal characteristics – in the context of corporate governance – that may influence the occurrence of corporate financial crime. The study further proposes the human governance factor as a possible mechanism to improve corporate governance in preventing such misbehaviour. This chapter highlights the personal characteristics of top executives, which may become the indicators of corporate financial crime, as well as human governance, which is shown to be one of the most important mechanisms of corporate governance for corporate financial crime prevention.

Many organizations around the world currently are facing board diversity issues and challenges. Hence, this empirical paper investigates the relationship between board diversity and firm’s financial performance. We use a sample of 35 companies from five countries in Southeast Europe (Macedonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Greece) for the period between 2008 and 2012 to find that, on average, companies with well-educated board members are more profitable and overvalued on the market. When running the regression again to test the levels of heterogeneity, we also find that the companies with more women on board tend to be overvalued on the market, while those with more foreigners on board are subject of undervaluation. The paper mostly contributes to the literature on corporate governance and board diversity. First, we postulate the impact of each of the board diversity variables on the financial performance and then show the extent of this impact and its economic interpretation. Our findings have important practitioners’ implications for corporate regulators and policy-makers since the demonstrated positive impact of the well-educated board members on firm’s financial performance gives a new impetus in building a corporate strategy that will intend to engage more people holding PhD on board.

We examine the relationship between how mutual fund sponsors configure their board(s) of directors and the performance of the funds under a particular board's purview. Fund sponsors utilize either one board to oversee all the funds within a fund family or multiple boards that oversee one fund or a subset of the family's funds. Our results suggest that fund families – that is, sponsors – that use multiple boards have significantly higher objective-adjusted board-level weighted excess returns. But, there are no significant differences in the objective-adjusted board-level weighted excess expenses. These results are consistent with the argument that multiple boards provide superior monitoring.