Corporate governance research suggests that boards of directors play key roles in governing company
strategy. Although qualitative research has examined board-management relationships to describe board
involvement in strategy, we lack detailed insights into how directors engage with organizational members
for governing a complex and long-term issue such as product innovation. Our multiple-case study of four
listed pharmaceutical firms reveals a sequential process of board involvement: Directors with deep expertise
govern scientific innovation, followed by the full board's involvement in its strategic aspects. The nature of
director involvement varies across board levels in terms of the direction (proactive or reactive), timing
(regular or spontaneous), and the extent of formality of exchanges between directors and organizational
members. Our study contributes to corporate governance research by introducing the concept of board
behavioral diversity and by theorizing about the multilevel, structural, and temporal dimensions of board
behavior and its relational characteristics.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VIENNA/oai:epub.wu-wien.ac.at:7042 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Klarner, Patricia, Probst, Gilbert, Useem, Michael |
| Publisher | Sage |
| Source Sets | Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1476127019839321, https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/home, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3750-8866, http://epub.wu.ac.at/7042/ |
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