Directors’ human capital, firm strategy, and firm performance
Christophe Volonté and
Pascal Gantenbein
Journal of Management & Governance, 2016, vol. 20, issue 1, 115-145
Abstract:
Ideally, corporations are directed by boards whose directors provide valuable human capital that match the firms’ strategy. We investigate how directors’ human capital (international experience, industrial know-how, CEO experience, and financial know-how) affects firm performance including the firm’s strategy (diversification and internationalization) and how human capital is related to acquisition strategies (non-diversifying and international acquisitions). Our sample consists of 560 firm-year observations in Switzerland. We find empirical evidence that directors’ human capital affects firm performance and that this relationship depends on the firm’s strategy. Furthermore, human capital is also correlated with acquisition strategy. The study shows that focusing on board independence and compliance issues may be unrewarding in board research and practice. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Keywords: Corporate governance; Board of directors; Resource dependence theory (RDT); Agency theory; Human capital; Firm performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)
Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10997-014-9304-y (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jmgtgv:v:20:y:2016:i:1:p:115-145
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/10997/PS2
DOI: 10.1007/s10997-014-9304-y
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Management & Governance is currently edited by Lino Cinquini
More articles in Journal of Management & Governance from Springer, Accademia Italiana di Economia Aziendale (AIDEA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().