Jonathan L. Johnson

META-ANALYTIC REVIEWS OF BOARD COMPOSITION, LEADERSHIP STRUCTURE, AND FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE

Careful review of extant research addressing the relationships between board composition, board leadership structure, and firm financial performance demonstrates little consistency in results. In general, neither board composition nor board leadership structure has been consistently linked to firm financial performance. In response to these findings, we provide metaanalyses of 54 empirical studies of board composition (159 samples, n = 40,160) and 31 empirical studies of board leadership structure (69 samples, n= 12,915) and their relationships to firm financial performance. These—and moderator analyses relying on firm size, the nature of the financial performance indicator, and various operationalizations of board composition— provide little evidence of systematic governance structure/financial performance relationships.

Number of Directors and Financial Performance: A Meta-Analysis

Although a host of theory-driven rationales suggest a relationship between board of directors size and firm performance, the literature provides no consensus about the direction of that relationship. A meta-analysis of 131 samples (N = 20,620) provided systematic evidence of nonzero, positive, true population estimates of board size-performance relationships.

Boards of Directors: A Review and Research Agenda

Boards of directors have been the subject of extensive conceptualization and empirical research. We review literature addressing boards of directors from the perspective of the control, service, and resource dependence roles that directors are hypothesized to fulfill, with particular focus on that research reported after the Zahra and Pearce (1989) compendium. We also discuss a number of methodological and conceptual elements which complicate the aggregation of research in this area of inquiry.

Turnover, social capital losses, and performance

A theory of turnover, social capital losses, and store performance was developed and tested in 38 locations of a restaurant chain. We assessed the ability of social capital losses to predict varian...

Compensation Committee Composition as a Determinant of Ceo Compensation

Extant research examining the relationship between a firms board and its CEOs compensation has focused primarily on the composition of the board-at-large. However, it may be the nature of the com...

Sources of CEO Power and Firm Financial Performance: A Longitudinal Assessment

The chief executive officer (CEO) is generally regarded as the most powerful organizational member. Attributions regarding the potential effect of a strong CEO on firm financial performance are common in both the academic literature and popular press. The oft-made assumption is that a powerful CEO will impact firm performance. The anticipated direction of this influence, however, has not been uniformly established. Moreover, we are not aware of any direct empirical assessment of the relationship between CEO power and firm financial performance. We are also intrigued by the potential for reciprocal effects—firm performance impacts the level of CEO’s power. Our review of the literature demonstrates no empirical attention to this possibility. This study relies on a four-wave panel design to assess the nature of the relationship between CEO power and firm performance. Results of LISREL analysis demonstrate that aspects of CEO power and financial performance are, in fact, interrelated. Performance was found to...

Enterprise system implementation and employee: understanding the role of advice networks

The implementation of enterprise systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, alters business processes and associated workflows, and introduces new software applications that employees must use. Employees frequently find such technology-enabled organizational change to be a major challenge. Although many challenges related to such changes have been discussed in prior work, little research has focused on post-implementation job outcomes of employees affected by such change. We draw from social network theory-- specifically, advice networks--to understand a key post-implementation job outcome (i.e., job performance). We conducted a study among 87 employees, with data gathered before and after the implementation of an ERP system module in a business unit of a large organization. We found support for our hypotheses that workflow advice and software advice are associated with job performance. Further, as predicted, we found that the interactions of workflow and software get-advice, workflow and software give-advice, and software get- and give-advice were associated with job performance. This nuanced treatment of advice networks advances our understanding of post-implementation success of enterprise systems.

More Than Adopters: Competing Influences in the Interlocking Directorate

This study explores the competing influences of different types of board interlocks on diffusion of a strategic initiative among a population of firms. We examine a broad social network of interlocking directors in U.S. firms over a period of 17 years and consider the likelihood that these firms will adopt a strategy of expansion into China. Results show that ties to adopters that unsuccessfully implement this strategy have a nearly equal and opposing effect on the likelihood of adoption as do ties to those that successfully implement the strategy. Ties to those that do not implement the strategy also have a suppressive effect on the likelihood of adoption. Furthermore, we examine a firms position in the core-periphery structure of the interlocking directorate, finding that ties to adopters closer to the network core positively affect the likelihood of adoption. We discuss the implications of our study for social network analysis, governance, and internationalization research.

Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital

The article reviews the book “Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital,” by Ronald S. Burt.