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This paper seeks to examine the relationship between chief executive officer (CEO) duality and firm performance and the moderating effects of the family control factor on this relationship with respect to public companies in Hong Kong.

This study employs publicly available data from financial databases and the annual reports of a sample of 128 publicly‐listed companies in Hong Kong in 2003.

Neither agency theory nor stewardship theory alone can adequately explain the duality‐performance relationship. The empirical evidence suggests that the relationship between CEO duality and accounting performance is contingent on the presence of the family control factor. CEO duality is good for non‐family firms, while non‐duality is good for family‐controlled firms.

The study is based on publicly available financial data, and actual board processes are not observed.

The design of board leadership structure is contingent on corporate ownership and control (family control or not).

The paper provides empirical evidence that CEO duality is not necessarily bad for public companies in Hong Kong and would be of interest to regulatory bodies, business practitioners, and academic researchers.

The aim of this paper is to examine the effect of structural and demographic board diversity as well as board tenure on family firms' environmental performance, by analyzing the differences between family and non-family businesses and within family firms.

Tobit regressions are applied to investigate the effect of independent directors, CEO non-duality, board gender diversity and board tenure on environmental performance. The study also controls for other board and firm characteristics, as well as for time, industry and country-fixed effects. In doing so, the authors rely on a sample of non-financial listed firms from France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal over the period 2014–2021.

The authors find that women on the board positively influence environmental performance and this effect is significant only in family firms, although board tenure negatively moderates the relationship. Board independence significantly affects environmental performance only in non-family firms. A strong presence of family directors has a negative effect on family firms' environmental performance, especially when directors' turnover is low.

This paper examines the unexplored relationship between structural board diversity and environmental performance in family companies. This study provides empirical evidence on the association between gender diversity and family firms' environmental performance focusing for the first time on a European setting. Moreover, this study provides evidence of a different effect of board tenure in family and non-family businesses.

Discussions in contemporary spirituality frequently highlight a phenomenon of spiritual seeking; moreover, people often describe their spiritual journeys in terms of a search. This paper takes a closer look at this metaphor by presenting a study that analysed spiritual seeking and its informational features in contemporary non-institutionalised settings.

In this study, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with thirteen spiritual teachers and speakers who were asked questions about spiritual seeking in contemporary non-institutionalised spirituality.

The authors' participants explained that contemporary spiritual seekers sought spiritual information as a result of affective, developmental and metaphysical concerns. Moreover, their analysis indicated that spiritual information-seeking behaviour incorporated practices such as prayer, yoga and meditation, and contemporary spiritual information interactions were facilitated through spiritual retreats, meditation classes, yoga classes and online social platforms.

Since the authors focused on spiritual seeking in contemporary non-institutionalised settings, their findings cannot exhaustively represent all spiritual pursuits in contemporary society. Their study (1) identifies the informational features of contemporary spiritual seeking, (2) explains spiritual seeking as an activity that may theoretically reside within a broader framework of profound information interactions and (3) helps theorise the concept of qualitative profundity in information science research.

This study provides an intuitive contextual approach for undertaking information research in under-explored domains such as contemplation and spirituality.

The paper aims to craft a non-parametric composite value for the board quality of Indian banks where the weights can be assigned endogenously.

The study employed a non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA)-based novel extension known as the benefit of doubt approach. To measure the strength of the Indian bank corporate board in terms of board efficiency (BEF), the study used a mixed approach, i.e. first, the study calculates the percentile ranks of the five attributes that the study assumes are the characteristics of the strong board including board size, number of outside directors, frequency of meetings, non-duality leadership and board gender diversity. Thereafter, the study performs the benefit-to-doubt approach to finally measure the efficiency of the board.

The findings of the study establish that the methodological framework present in the study to measure the strength of the board in terms of BEF has been a much superior method over the other weighted and non-weighted linear average methods.

This methodology aids the shareholders, investors and regulatory bodies in rating the Indian banks based on their strength in terms of better monitoring boards and ensuring a smooth agent–owner relationship.

The benefit of doubt approach has been a unique and novel methodology to craft the composite value for any multidimensional phenomenon. One of the major benefits of using this approach is that it assigns the weights endogenously to each dimension and thereafter collectively determines the efficiency of such a phenomenon.

Due to stakeholders’ concerns on the contribution of corporate governance in monitoring insurance companies during financial crisis, this study aims to investigate whether and how various corporate governance practices would have affected firm performance of listed and non-listed insurance firms in the UK during financial crisis.

This study uses a unique manually collected data set from listed and non-listed insurance firms in the UK and applies different regressions models to test the hypotheses and to address the endogeneity problem.

The findings show that board non-duality and the presence of a majority shareholder improve firm performance in insurance companies. Furthermore, the findings for the sub-samples indicate a stronger positive association between board of directors and firm performance in listed insurance companies after the financial crisis, while a positive impact has been found between large shareholders and external audit firms in non-listed insurance companies before and during the crisis.

The results offer important practical implications for the government, management, shareholders and policymakers. For example, regulators and policymakers should benefit from these results to revise the recommendations for corporate governance mechanisms that prove to be effective on firm performance, as well as those mechanisms that have different or unexpected effects among listed or non-listed firms and/or during the turbulent periods. Investors should be aware of those specific corporate governance mechanisms that would have higher effect on performance of UK insurance firms in which they are considering to invest in.

This study contributes to the current literature by exploring the effect of corporate governance on financial performance by comparing between listed and non-listed insurance companies during financial crisis. Further, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to use two new insurance-related performance measures, the revenue growth ratio and the adjusted combined ratio, as performance proxies to explore whether these new variables create any insights.

This paper aims to investigate the joint effect of board characteristics on financial performance. Most of the existing literature implicitly assumes that the relationship between either board composition, or board leadership structure and financial performance is direct.

The generalized least squares method was performed as a panel data analysis on a sample of 40 Egyptian listed firms during the period from 2008 to 2010.

The results demonstrated that under board leadership structure that assigns the duties of the CEO and chairman to the same person, increasing the proportion of non-executive members to the total number of directors has a negative impact on firm financial performance.

First, corporate governance structures do not operate in a vacuum, and therefore, corporate governance mechanisms must be considered and assessed altogether. Second, failure to understand the underlying interdependency among corporate governance mechanisms may result in arguments that blame some corporate governance designs for poor financial performance. Third, there is no single board governance mechanism that can be considered ideal, but there are combinations of these mechanisms that are preferred.

The paper adds to the corporate governance literature by providing empirical evidence from the emerging market of Egypt. The evidence shows that the relationship between board characteristics and financial performance is not a monotonic relationship. Consequently, these findings imply that existing evidence explaining the relationship between board characteristics and financial performance needs to be interpreted with some caution.

This study aims to draw on the resource dependence theory to synthesize the conflicting arguments as well as commonalities of the agency and stewardship perspectives on the relationship between CEO duality and firm performance.

Multiple regression analysis is used to analyze the data collected from a sample of 212 large-scale publicly listed companies representing 20 sectors in the Colombo Stock Exchange in Sri Lanka.

The research results based on all of 212 publicly listed companies in Sri Lanka show, in support of the agency theory, that CEO duality exerts a negative effect on firm performance when the CEO is equipped with additional informal power. Conversely, CEO duality exhibits a positive effect on firm performance when board involvements are high, a finding that supports the commonalities of the agency and stewardship theoretical perspectives.

By examining the governance practices and concepts in an Asian developing economy, this study provides insight into the power dynamics between the CEO and the board of directors in managerial contexts that are largely different from those in western countries.

This study expands the theoretical underpinning of corporate governance research by identifying the performance implications of CEO duality within the broad context of the resource provision of the board of directors and the informal power of CEOs.

As the primary decision makers, chief executive officers (CEOs) play pivotal roles in firm innovation. However, little is known regarding how CEOs influence the exploitation and exploration paradox. To advance theory and research, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the joint effects of CEO tenure and CEO–chair duality on a firm’s shifting emphasis between exploitative and exploratory innovation.

This paper takes the approach of a longitudinal sample of 81 US pharmaceutical firms.

As CEOs’ tenure advance, their firms’ percentage of exploitative innovation increases. Furthermore, non-duality (separation of board chair and CEO) further strengthens the positive relationship between CEO tenure and the percentage of exploitative innovation.

This study integrates upper echelons theory and behavioral agency theory to juxtapose the effects of CEOs on technological innovation. This study extends knowledge of strategic leadership and innovation by showing that CEOs influence the balance between exploitative and exploratory innovation. Furthermore, this study also contributes to the corporate governance literature by demonstrating that monitoring vigilance could inhibit capable CEOs from pursuing more exploratory innovation.

Boards of directors should allow CEOs to have greater discretion over innovation, and vigilant monitoring and control may force CEOs to focus less on exploration.

This is one of the few studies that explicitly investigate how CEO influences a firm’s emphasis on exploitative innovation and exploratory innovation.

This study examines whether Shari’ah approved companies with majority Muslim directors adopt better corporate governance (CG) than non‐Shari’ah approved companies with majority non‐Muslim directors and whether the performance of the former is better than that of the latter. The objective of this study is to determine whether religious factor has an influence in adopting corporate governance mechanisms and in performance. Performance of the companies is measured in relation to three perspectives, namely, Shari’ah compliance, environmental performance, and social performance. This study used secondary data and the leading 50 firms were selected from each group based on their market capitalization for the year 2002. The proxies for good corporate governance are CEO non‐duality, the proportion of non‐executive directors on the board, and the proportion of independent non‐executive directors on the board. The proxies used to measure Shari’ah compliance are the ratio of prohibited income to total income and the ratio of prohibited expenses to total expenses. The variables used to measure the environmental and social performance are certification of ISO 14001 and OHsas 18001, respectively. The results generally showed that there is little significant difference between the CG and performance of Shari’ah approved companies with majority Muslim directors and non‐Shari’ah approved companies with majority non‐Muslim directors, although the former is marginally better for both, in a few instances.

Drawing on agency theory and resource dependence theory, the study aims to link board demographic diversity and independence to corporate social performance.

Data were collected from various sources for a sample of 475 publicly traded Fortune 500 companies between the years 2007 and 2008.

It is found that board gender diversity is positively related to institutional and technical strength ratings, while board racial diversity is positively related to institutional strength rating only. Both the proportion of outside directors and CEO non‐duality were negatively associated with institutional and technical weakness ratings.

The sample was predominantly large, publicly traded national and international corporations, which might limit the generalizability of the findings.

Management personnel should be cognizant of how board configurations and leadership structure may influence their corporate reputation for social responsibility. Efforts should be made to foster a group dynamic that is conducive to effective board functioning.

Few empirical studies have examined the relationship between board characteristics and corporate social performance. This study contributes to the literature by examining such associations.