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Corporate governance is an area of interest to researchers, stakeholders and the general public. In recent times, there has been an increased concern about the effectiveness of the board within corporate organizations due to corporate scandals and accounting irregularities of some well known firms, which highlighted the inefficiency of monitoring corporate boards and the overseeing of managerial decision making. This paper aims to investigate the effects that a number of factors such as organisational demography, organisational size, ownership type, board size, CEO duality and CEO dependence/independence have on board configuration.

The paper reviews the literature on organisational demography and board structure characteristics. Primary data were gathered from 27 management shipping companies having their head office in Greece.

Findings show high levels of influence of the CEOs on the Board of Directors, since in most cases the CEO is the Chairman of the Board and high levels of control asked by the top management teams in almost all strategic decision processes.

The paper's contribution lies primarily on investigating issues relating to corporate governance in an extremely dynamic, highly extrovert, truly international and at the same time family owned sector; the shipping industry.