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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating effect of international trade on outside director system in Korean firms. The authors expected that Korean firms highly depending on international trade would mitigate the resource provision function of outside director system in order to reduce information asymmetry among global business partners. In addition, the authors tried to find out the functions of outside director system: the control function based on agency theory and resource provision function based on resource dependence theory.

The authors tested the hypotheses by Poisson regression with 2011 and 2002 Korean-listed manufacturing firms. The dependent variable is the number of excessively appointed outside directors and independent variable is CEO type: family CEO or professional CEO. The moderating variable is the dependency on international trade measured by export proportion out of total sales.

The authors found that not control but resource provision function was a main role of outside director system in Korean firms. The authors also found negative moderating effect of dependency on international trade, which means that firms highly depending on global market tended to consider outside director system as control function, namely “global standard.”

This paper is the leading study that tries to analyze empirically the relationship between international trade and the function of governance mechanism; outside director system in Korean firms. It also confirms that Korean firms adopted outside director system on the basis of the resource dependence theory.

Using a contingency approach, the purpose of this paper is to study how organizational factors (such as the organizational life cycle, firm size, firm ownership concentration and firm technology) determine the relative importance of the monitoring and provision of resources roles provided by board members.

This paper highlights the importance of contingency factors in carrying out board’s roles using a sample of 579 European firms registered in the STOXX Europe 600 index. The authors used a longitudinal analysis for the period from 2002 through to 2011.

The results show that the monitoring role is more relevant for companies that are large, are operating at the mature and stagnant stages, have a dispersed ownership and are low-technology. However, the provision of resources role is more relevant for companies that are in the growth and stagnant stages, and have a concentrated ownership.

The traditional analysis that relates the board’s structure and composition to the board’s roles focuses on determining what board should be the best. It plays little attention to analyzing which organizational factors affect the importance and presence of monitoring or resource dependence roles. In this regard, this work adds significant insights to agency theory and resource dependence theory as, with a contingency framework, the research aims to find what functions the board needs to develop in order to get better firm performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how directors’ roles and social identities are shaped by gender and board life stage, using pre- and post-crisis Iceland as the setting. Recent theoretical work suggests the importance of directors’ monitoring and resource provision roles at certain board life stages; however, there is limited empirical evidence of directors’ identification with these roles as well as social role identification as a member of the board.

The authors contribute empirical evidence from interviews with 23 corporate directors in Iceland on individual identification with the director role of monitoring and resource provision, relational identification with the CEO role and social identification as a member of the board.

Prior to the crisis, male directors identified more strongly with resource provision and with their social roles and less strongly with monitoring roles. Compared to their male counterparts, pre-crisis female directors identified more strongly with monitoring and did not identify with their social roles. After the crisis, mature boards’ male director role identities were little changed; male directors continued to identify with resource provision and social identification, rather than monitoring, roles. Compared to pre-crisis, post-crisis female directors described greater identity with their resource provision roles and reported that male directors resented their attempts to fulfill their monitoring roles. In post-crisis, newly formed diverse boards, male and female directors reported very similar role identities which reflected balanced monitoring and resource provision roles, for example providing the board with ethical individual identities and unblemished reputations. The findings of this paper indicate that board composition and life cycle stage might have more impact on director identity than a pre- or post-crisis setting. These findings suggest implications for theory, practice and future research.

This paper provides further empirical evidence of the roles male and female directors identify with on corporate boards. Its originality lies in the context of the board work in terms of newly formed and mature boards, before and after the financial crisis, with differing gender composition (male-dominated and gender-balanced boards).

Using data from the 2013 European Company Survey, this chapter operationalizes the representation gap as the desire for greater employee involvement in decision-making expressed by the representative of the leading employee representative body at the workplace. According to this measure, there is evidence of a substantial shortfall in employee involvement in the European Union, not dissimilar to that reported for the United States. The chapter proceeds to investigate how the size of this representation gap varies by type of representative structure, information provided by management, the resource base available to the representatives, and the status of trust between the parties. Perceived deficits are found to be smaller where workplace representation is via works councils rather than union bodies. Furthermore, the desire for greater involvement is reduced where information provided the employee representative on a range of establishment issues is judged satisfactory. A higher frequency of meetings with management also appears to mitigate the expressed desire for greater involvement. Each of these results is robust to estimation over different country clusters. However, unlike the other arguments, the conclusion that shortfalls in employee involvement representation are smaller under works councils than union bodies is nullified where trust in management is lacking.

We investigate the effect of the adoption of formal board structure and board processes on firm performance in Colombian family firms, in a context where firms can choose specific aspects of board structure and processes. We deploy insights from the behavioral governance perspective to develop arguments about how family businesses may choose board elements based on their degree of control over the firm (absolute control or less), and its effect on firm performance.

We use an unbalanced data panel of 404 firm-year observations. The data was obtained from the annual financial and corporate governance reports of 62 Colombian stock-issuing firms for the period 2008–2014 – due to change in regulation, data could not be added beyond 2014. Panel data technique with random effects was used.

The results show that board structure is positively associated with financial performance, however, this relationship is negative in businesses where family has absolute control. We also found that there is a negative association between board processes and performance, but positive association in family-controlled businesses.

Our research contributes to research streams on effects of family control in firm choices and on the interactive effect of governance choices and institutional context and more generally how actors interact (rather than react) with their institutional context.

This study aims to examine the relationship between board capital and firm performance in the Chinese tourism industry.

The study’s sample includes firms from the Chinese hotel, air transportation/travel and catering industries. This study explores the governance environment in tourism industries. This study estimates three dimensions of the board, including education, expertise and directors interlock. These dimensions are further grouped as human capital (i.e. education and expertise), social capital (interlocks) and board capital (sum of social and human capital). Ordinary least square regressions with multiple robustness tests are used to investigate the effect of board capital on firm value in Chinese listed tourism firms during 2005–2018.

This study finds that board capital positively impacts firm performance in its dimensions of human and social capital. This study also highlights the two important ownership contexts, namely, institutional investors and state-ownership, that shape the board capital-firm performance association in the Chinese tourism industry.

The findings suggest that board capital plays a significant role in corporate decisions. The results illustrate that higher board capital improves both governance mechanisms and resource provision roles of the board, resulting in higher firm value. The results further offer implications for managers and shareholders of tourism firms when electing directors as shareholders’ representatives.

The study has two important contributions. First, it extends the prior literature of firm value by considering the board’s human and social dimensions in the tourism sector. Second, contrary to prior research on board, this study takes three facets of board capital, education, expertise and interlocks that improve governance mechanisms and bring new resources in the shape of skills, knowledge and expertise.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether board gender diversity and other board characteristics affect earnings management practices of top public companies in Kazakhstan.

The study analyzes data of top public companies for the period 2010-2016. Data on corporate governance were manually collected from annual reports and investment memorandums, and financial data were collected from audited financial statements.

The empirical results show that companies with greater board gender diversity are more effective in constraining earnings management. The findings also indicate that companies with larger boards adopt a more restrained approach to earnings management practices, thus supporting the theoretical framework of the study. However, the results provide weak evidence of the association between board independence and earnings quality.

This study is the first to investigate the relationship between gender diversity and earnings management in emerging markets such as Kazakhstan that offers managerial and policy implications.

The purpose of this paper is to explore board functions and their location in family firms.

Through structured induction in a four-case study of medium-sized Swedish family firms, the authors demonstrate that board functions can be located in other arenas than in the common board and suggest propositions that explain their distribution.

(1) The board is but one of several arenas where board functions are performed. (2) The functions performed by the board vary in type and emphasis. (3) The non-family directors in a family firm serve the owners, even sometimes governing them, in what the authors term “bidirectional governance”. (4) The kin strategy of the family influences their governance. (5) The utilization of a board for governance stems from the family (together with its constitution, kin strategy and governance strategy), the board composition and the business conditions of the firm.

Being a case study the findings are restricted to concepts and theoretical propositions. Using structured induction, the study is not solely inductive but still contains the subjectivity of induction.

Governance agents should have an instrumental view on the board, considering it one possible governance arena among others, thereby economizing on governance.

The institutional pressure toward active boards could paradoxically reduce the importance of the board in family firms.

The board of a family company differs in its emphasis of board functions and these functions are performed with varying emphases in different governance arenas. The authors propose the concept of kin strategy, which refers to the governance importance of the structure of the owner and observations on bi-directional governance, indicating that the board can govern the owners.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of independent non-executive directors (INEDs) in Malaysian public listed companies (PLCs), other than the control role prescribed by agency theory and reformatory documents such as the Malaysian Code of Corporate Governance.

A qualitative research design, consisting of face-to-face interviews with 27 company directors of Malaysian-owned PLCs, was instigated.

The interviews revealed that INEDs do more than just monitor their executive counterparts. Apart from the control role, INEDs of Malaysian companies provide a conduit for mitigating uncertainties in the environment and perform invaluable services to the host companies.

This research utilized interviews. Generalizations may be an issue when interviews are used as the method of inquiry. Also, the sample is not random as access to many of the interviewed directors depended on recommendations. In addition, respondents were consciously selected in order to obtain various board positions that include independent and non-independent directors.

There are limited studies using qualitative research design in investigating INEDs’ performing other roles apart from the control role of the board in developing countries. Many of previous studies and literature in this area of corporate governance were predominantly based upon experiences of western economies.

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.