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This study looks at board governance in Ontario hospitals.

We conducted a research of the hospitals’ websites and a survey of board directors to study the board structure and examine governance practice in Ontario hospitals.

The findings suggest that the board structure and process in Ontario hospitals are in compliance with Accreditation Canada’s Governance Standards, and such administrative controls are appropriate. Ontario hospital boards, in general, have fulfilled their key functions of governance in terms of working as an effective board; developing a clear direction; supporting the organization to achieve its mandate; maintaining positive relationships with external stakeholders; and being accountable and achieving sustainable results. Building knowledge through information is an area where improvement is needed.

Ontario hospitals have implemented appropriate administrative controls in terms of board composition and committee structure. The results of a survey of 99 board directors from over 25 hospitals suggest that directors, in general, have a good understanding of their governance role and relationship with senior management as well as the government. The findings are also supportive of good governance practice where executives manage and nonexecutive directors monitor the performance of the executives. According to the respondents, Ontario’s hospital boards are actively involved in setting the mission, strategic goals and objectives of their organizations, and they take appropriate steps to ensure that risk management, client safety, and quality improvements are incorporated in their governance and strategic planning process. In order to discharge their fiduciary duty effectively, respondents would like to have more information from different sources. This is an area where management accounting professionals can become involved such that relevant information from a variety of sources, especially external sources, are provided to board directors for decision making.

Ontario’s hospital sector has undertaken initiatives through research and publications to promote good governance practice. Such leadership is critical to ensure that directors have the competence and skills to discharge their duties and responsibilities diligently. Hospital boards should focus on renewal while ensuring that board directors are equipped for the challenging task of governing through professional development and continuing education.

Limitations related to the use of questionnaire applies to this research study. Self-selection bias and low response rate limit the generalizability of the findings. Future research can examine the behavior of directors in the boardroom and the impact of governance variables on hospital performance, such as quality of care and patient safety.

We enjoin stakeholder theory, radical-cultural feminist theory, and critical race theory with critical intersectionality to critique findings which suggest that there still are significantly more men than women on nearly every Fortune 500 board of directors, with only six corporations featuring (50-50%) gender equity in 2017. Also, only 4.1% board members are women of color and 9% are men of color. Sixty-five people of color on corporate boards serve on more than one board. This means there are even fewer people of color filling top corporate leadership positions than meets the eye. The proposed alternative course of action is for boards of directors to follow the example of the small handful of peer Fortune 500 corporations that have achieved greater levels of board diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In this paper we develop a model for researching the influence that a board of directors can have on improving an organization’s sustainability performance. Our model explores sources of cognitive flexibility of boards needed to recognize and respond to the need for improved sustainability performance. We first define concepts of sustainability, sustainability competence, and sustainability performance. We then analyze two forms of board capital (a board’s human capital and its social capital) and three aspects of a board’s information processing (its patterns of information search, discussion and debate, and information absorption) that we suggest affect a board’s cognitive flexibility and thereby influence whether a board decides to adopt sustainability performance goals. Our model also suggests that an organization’s strategic flexibility – as represented by its current endowments of resource flexibilities and coordination flexibilities – will moderate the relationship between a board’s decision to adopt sustainability performance goals and an organization’s subsequent achievement of those goals. We also suggest that our model is generally relevant to any research seeking to predict the influence of boards on strategic change in many forms, not just to research focused on sustainability issues.

The board of directors of a firm is a governing body exercising key top-level decisions. Due to the involvement of the controlling families, boards of directors of family firms have been found to behave differently than those of other organizations. Besides family control, national and/or regional contexts have been suggested to influence how companies are governed. Boards of directors of family firms have been studied mostly in developed regions and knowledge from developing regions such as Latin America is scarce. This chapter summarizes the main findings about boards of directors in family firms and compares this research with our knowledge from Latin America. It discusses the different challenges and opportunities that owners of family firms and boards of directors face in the Latin American context. Finally, it suggests that research on boards of directors of family firms in Latin America has a very promising future as it still has to validate and/or contextualize findings in developed regions, overcome some theoretical and empirical limitations, explore some salient characteristics related to the institutional context in depth, and provide recommendations linking board characteristics and firm performance.

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.

We survey top managers of Fortune 1000 companies to learn if industry practitioners agree with the findings of academic research on specific corporate governance issues. We focus on board composition and size, executive/director compensation and ownership, firm performance, and other issues. The results suggest that the views of responding managers appear at odds with other empirical evidence provided in the literature on the majority of the issues examined. In addition, respondents are often unable to offer an opinion about whether they agree or disagree with specific corporate governance issues.

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.

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.

This chapter analyzes the relations among bank mergers, changes in boards and their networks, and changes in the global footprint of merging banks. We examine all mergers involving U.S. banks with foreign branches between 1986 and 2004. We find that while the largest banks have become even larger through mergers, their boards have stayed roughly the same size with the same pattern of connections, leaving banks relatively less central in the intercorporate network. And while global banks previously had more globally oriented boards, this is no longer the case, as the link between board networks and strategy has become more tenuous. Because global banks were particularly prone to merging, the average commercial bank in the U.S. is now far more domestically oriented than firms in most other industries. American banks have thus become more domestic at the same time that the rest of American industry has grown much more global.