Leader character in board governance
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Leader character in board governance Gerard Seijts1 · Alyson Byrne2 · Mary M. Crossan1 · Jeffrey Gandz1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract Despite the critical leadership role that corporate boards play in organizations, the character of their members has been neglected in research studies. We used a multimethod data collection approach to explore whether current directors in the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors believe that leader character plays an important role in board governance, particularly with regards to how boards make decisions, recruit new members, lead their organizations, and work together to perform their fiduciary and other responsibilities. Despite the perceived importance of leader character as reported by highly experienced corporate directors, we found that leader character is not commonly attended to in board conversations as a means to purposively improve the way boards operate. We outline practical implications of our findings as well as offer a call to action for future research on character in the context of board governance with the intent to improve governance in the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors and hence to foster sustained excellence in organizations. Keywords Leadership · Character · Boards · Board effectiveness · Board governance
1 Leader character in board governance Corporate directors exercise a number of critical leadership roles that can have substantial impact on corporate performance and sustainability. They appoint CEOs and often other members of the senior management team and approve major strategic * Gerard Seijts [email protected] Alyson Byrne [email protected] Mary M. Crossan [email protected] Jeffrey Gandz [email protected] 1
Western University, London, ON N6A 3K7, Canada
2
Memorial University, St. John’s, NF A1C 5S7, Canada
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decisions. They are responsible for setting corporate policies, monitoring management, and maintaining internal control (e.g., Dalton et al. 2007; Hillman et al. 2008; Johnson et al. 1996). They also provide valuable information and perspectives accessible through director interlocks (e.g., Finkelstein et al. 2009). As individuals, corporate directors are called on for their independent thought or thought leadership on a board while collectively they must work together to provide effective corporate governance. As a unit, however, boards are complex teams, such that unlike regular work teams, they tend to have unique characteristics. For example, boards have many part-time members, meet only episodically, tend to be larger than traditional work teams, and members devote varying levels of time to the board’s work between meetings (e.g., Forbes and Milliken 1999; Nadler 2004; Nadler et al. 2006). All of these characteristics make leadership efforts within a board context both more challenging but also more critical. We equate directors with leaders, both for their necessary disposition to lead and since most of them have had con
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