Factors determining the roles board members play in firms

Abstract

Directors play an important role in influencing board’s action and its effectiveness (Adams, Hermalin, & Weisbach, 2010). Therefore, corporate governance researchers have looked extensively at the determinants of director selection in a firm. Most of the work in this literature has looked at board composition and its size. However, there is limited amount of work that looks at the determinants of the role directors play in firms. Directors are expected to have both social and human capital and that is why they are invited on the boards of the firms. However, which of these capitals are they supposed to exploit more is not studied much. This is where this paper makes an attempt to contribute to the existing literature. In this paper, we present propositions on factors that determine the roles directors play in firms. We focus on three major roles that are played by directors: advisor, resource provider, and monitor. We argue that factors like firm’s characteristics (size, age, ownership structure), environmental dynamism, and life cycle stage of the firm determine which of these three roles will be played by the directors of the firms.