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To better understand the relationship between the headquarters and subsidiaries of multinational corporations, we introduce and test a theoretical framework that builds on and extends the positive agency theoretic corporate governance literature. Results indicate that there are three types of subsidiary bundles of corporate governance mechanisms that are used by multinational corporations. In addition, the following factors can help predict what type of subsidiary bundle a multinational corporation will use to align the interests of its headquarters with a particular subsidiary: the multinational corporation’s international strategy, its subsidiary’s importance, environmental uncertainty faced by its subsidiary, and its subsidiary’s age.

This study aims to explore corporate governance (CG) practices that can lead to firms’ better performance in different organizational life cycles. The authors propose a configurational approach to explore how a set of CG practices combine in bundles to achieve high performance outcomes for firms across their corporate life cycles.

Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis was used to analyze a sample of data of 21 countries and 9 industries. Data referred to the period of 9 years extending from the year 2005 to the year 2013.

This study reveals that there are multiple CG practices that exist through firms that can achieve high firm performance. Moreover, CG practices combine in different ways for firms in their growth, maturity and declining stages.

This study demonstrates the value of using a configurational analytical approach to explore both the firm and country-specific CG practices (together) that engage firms to achieve the desired level of performance across the corporate life cycles.

The current study draws attention to the policymakers’ need to assess the current level of regulatory and competitive development of their countries and form policy accordingly. The approach used in the current research study not only offers the linkages between CG and performance to managers as incentives to comply with regulation but also to view CG-related activity as a strategic move.

The approach used in the current research study not only offers the linkages between CG and performance to managers as incentives to comply with regulation but also to view CG-related activity as a strategic move.

This study broadening the focus of CG studies to include a rigorous explanation of the global CG phenomena and to provide effective solutions for the practitioners.

This study demonstrates the value of using a configurational analytical approach to explore both the firm and country-specific CG practices (together) that engage firms to achieve the desired level of performance across the corporate life cycles.

The purpose of this paper is to provide comprehensive mapping of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) applications in business and management research and to examine the sub-fields of corporate governance research in this context.

Through a systematic literature review of 22 articles, the paper describes and analyses how QCA is used in the corporate governance field, what can be learned from the methodology’s implementation in corporate governance studies and why authors justify its use.

The findings highlight that QCA in corporate governance is still at an early stage of development. The paper encourages governance scholars to use this method to transform QCA from a niche into a mainstream method because it is appropriate for understanding both complex phenomena of social reality and issues of corporate governance that require an approach able to capture configurations of conditions, asymmetric patterns and equifinal explanations.

This is the first complete overview of the existing literature concerning QCA’s application in corporate governance research and reveals implications for its future use. In this way, it extends the previous work on QCA’s benefits to management researchers and other critical reviews of applications in QCA. This study encourages scholars to renew their understanding of corporate governance issues through a new analysis method that can help to discover conceptual and empirical relations among case-oriented and variable-oriented analyses in terms of interrelations to examine corporate governance practices holistically.

This paper aims to develop a framework that aids in achieving the desired state of financial performance for corporate enterprises based on distinct configurations of corporate governance (CG) practices.

This study uses a fuzzy-based system to arrive at a definitive configuration of CG practices that lead to a specific level of firm’s performance.

This analysis of the panel data of 92 National Stock Exchange–listed companies conducted for RONW on selected CG variables shows that eight fuzzy configurations lead to a particular state of RONW. The authors compare the results with the conventional regression-based scoring models.

Corporate enterprises can use the derived bundles of CG practices leading to a specific set of financial performance (RONW) to aid the decision-making process in defining and implementing their governance structures. The regulators can modify or customize the law-mandated CG practices to reduce redundancies and promote the national agenda of economic efficiency.

Reacting to the calls in the contemporary literature to further examine the relationship between board attributes and firms’ decisions to obtain corporate social responsibility assurance (CSRA) through the use of pioneering techniques, this study aims to analyse the influence of such attributes together with the existence of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) committee on the adoption of CSRA using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (Fs-QCA).

Fs-QCA was performed on a sample of nonfinancial European companies listed on the STOXX Europe 600 index over the period 2016–2018.

The study findings indicate that the decision to obtain a CSRA report depends on a complex combination of the influence of the CSR committee and certain board attributes, such as size, experience, independence, meeting frequency, gender and CEO separation. These attributes play essential contributing roles and, if suitably combined, stimulate the adoption of CSRA.

The study findings are important for policymakers, professionals, organisations and regulators in forming and modifying the rules and guidelines related to CSR committees and board composition.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study represents the first examination of the impact of board attributes and CSR committees on the adoption of CSRA using Fs-QCA method. It also offers a novel methodological contribution to the board-CSRA literature by combining traditional statistical (logistic regression) and Fs-QCA methods. This study emphasises the benefits of Fs-QCA as an alternative to logistic regression analysis. Through the use of these methods, the research illustrates that Fs-QCA offers more detailed and informative results when compared to those obtained through logistic regression analysis. This finding highlights the potential of Fs-QCA to enhance our understanding of complex phenomena in academic research.

Growing social concerns and ecological issues accelerate firms’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) engagement. Hence, this study aims to advance the existing literature by focusing on the interplay between institutional and firm governance mechanisms for greater ESG engagement. More specifically, the authors investigate whether public governance stimulates excessive ESG engagement and whether corporate governance moderates this relationship.

Using a sample of 43,803 firm-year observations affiliated with 41 countries and 9 industries, the authors adopt a country, industry and year fixed-effects regression analysis.

The authors find that public governance strength via its six dimensions stimulates excessive ESG engagement. This implies that firms in countries with strong voice and accountability, political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law and control of corruption are more motivated for ESG engagement. Furthermore, corporate governance negatively moderates the relationship between all public governance dimensions (except political stability) and excessive ESG engagement. This implies that public governance and corporate governance are substitutes for encouraging firms to commit to ESG. Further tests reveal that whereas these results in the baseline analyses are valid for developed countries, they are not valid in emerging markets.

The findings support the interplay between institutional and agency theories. In countries with strong (weak) institutional mechanisms, corporate governance becomes weak (strong) in inciting greater stakeholder engagement. This implies that the public governance mechanism alleviates agency costs, rendering internal mechanisms of corporate governance noncompulsory for ESG engagement.

The findings suggest that emerging countries need to reinforce their institutions for greater accountability, regulatory quality and control of corruption, which will have a domino effect on firms in addressing stakeholder expectations. The results also advise emerging country firms to augment their internal monitoring mechanisms for greater stakeholder engagement, such as structuring boards and establishing corporate social responsibility mechanisms, committees and policies.

This study contributes to the recent literature investigating the role of corporate governance mechanisms in excessive ESG engagement. The study also explores whether public governance is associated with greater ESG involvement and provides a comprehensive analysis of the association between six indicators of public governance quality and excessive ESG practices in developed and emerging economies.

This paper aims to explore why private equity (PE) cares about corporate social responsibility (CSR) of its investees given their relatively short investment time-horizon and how it designs corporate governance (CG) bundle to achieve both financial and CSR goals of the private firms it invests in.

Case study design is applied to get deeper insights on the why and how questions posed. Analysis is based on triangulation of secondary data and in-depth interviews with both PE and their investee firms.

The authors find that long-term sustainability supported by CSR increases firm value. They also outline specific CG bundle that the PE uses to achieve both its financial and CSR goals. CG mechanisms appeared to reflect agency theory, but even more resource dependence theory.

The outlined CG bundle could be used as a template for all types of private firm owners to improve both financial and CSR performance of the firm.

The paper adds to fragmented area of CG and CSR interface. The authors specifically focus on several under-researched contexts of this interface: private small and medium size firms (SMEs), emerging markets and PE investors.

Corporate governance research based on agency theory has been criticized for being “under-contextualized,” and for evaluating various governance practices independently. To address both criticisms, we take a configurational approach and show how firm-level governance practices interact with informational asymmetries associated with a firm’s industry. By examining foreign Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) that have chosen to list on London stock exchanges, we demonstrate that an assessment of the firm-level corporate governance configurations is incomplete without taking into account the firm’s industry affiliation. Our use of fs/QCA underscores the possibilities configurational approaches have in advancing theories of corporate governance.

The aim of this study is to explore and understand corporate governance patterns in family firms across Latin America. This is in response to several calls in the academic literature urging for more empirical studies in corporate governance in developing regions.

Following a configurative perspective, a hierarchical cluster analysis is applied to a sample of the 155 largest Latin American family firms.

The authors identify three main corporate governance configurations across Latin American countries. First, the exported governance model resembles many characteristics of Anglo-American and Continental Europe governance patterns of public listed control, having independence from the board of directors, and mainly hiring non-family management. Second, the super-familial governance model describes private ownership where one or multiple families control both the board of directors and the top-management team. Finally, the hybrid governance model is the largest cluster identified in the sample and combines governance characteristics of both of the foregoing configurations. This configuration exhibits ownership structured through public offerings of shares combined with leadership of the board of directors by a family member as well as moderate family influence on the board and management.

This is the first study to investigate corporate governance in the largest listed and privately-owned family firms in Latin America. The article extends the conversation on family firm heterogeneity and contributes to the configurative approach in the family business field by offering a cross-country perspective and identifying meaningful taxonomies that are applicable beyond national boundaries.

Despite agency theory and resource dependence theory suggesting that – albeit through different mechanisms – board independence positively influences firm internationalization, empirical evidence on this relationship has been mixed and inconclusive. Based on this, the purpose of the present study is twofold: first, to analyze and synthesize the existing empirical literature and, second, to develop new theoretical insights on the effect of board independence on firm internationalization.

The authors used advanced meta-analytic techniques that allowed them, first, to synthesize the existing empirical literature on the board independence–firm internationalization relationship and, second, to examine the effect of several contingencies on such relationship. This study relies on data from 87 primary studies (published and unpublished) carried out in multiple academic fields in the period 1998–2021 and covering 49 countries.

The results confirm the established agency and resource-dependence arguments, suggesting that higher board independence is associated with greater firm internationalization. Moreover, the results show that the focal relationship is moderated by home-country formal and informal institutional factors, and in particular, the legal protection of minority shareholders and family business legitimacy. The authors do not find evidence that CEO duality and board size moderate the focal relationship or that board independence has a stronger effect on breadth than on depth of internationalization.

This study lies at the intersection of the literatures on corporate governance and firm internationalization and on comparative corporate governance of the multinational firm, shedding further light on the role played by institutional environments in determining the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanisms.