Sistemas de Juego en Baloncesto

As all other scholarly research, this thesis wouldn’t be able to fully address all relevant aspects in the effectiveness of corporate governance and leadership structure and their roles in strategic management and firm performance. We would like to point out several directions for future research and call attention from scholars to devote efforts in the following aspects. First, this thesis takes a behavioral perspective and adopts social psychological theories to investigate board effectiveness and its implications for both strategic management and firm performance. Specifically, we’ve examined directors’ behavioral patterns in two scenarios: board gender diversity and independent directors (IDs). Both scenarios are constantly showed to have important implications for board effectiveness in terms of strategic and monitoring roles (e.g. Duchin et al., 2010; Ma & Khanna, 2015; Nielsen & Huse, 2010a; Torchia, Calabrò, & Huse, 2011). With regard to board gender diversity research, prior research has mostly treated female directors as a united group, and the focus is also laid upon the difference between the two gender groups. As it has built the foundations for the research stream, there is clearly a demand for more research on the exploration of the differences within the group of female directors. For example, some female directors might possess key resources (such as skills and social networks), which can greatly enhance their influences on board. These female directors are also likely to have more power and intensified involvement in strategic decision-making process. Therefore, future studies might investigate how the power gap among female directors can influence the gender dynamics in the boardroom. For instance, it would be interesting to observe whether the presence of female directors with key resources would play a similar role to female board chair and improve the status of other female directors. Also, besides the impacts on strategic change, how gender dynamics would influence the initiation and implementation of other

strategies, such as innovation and acquisition, could enhance our understanding on the connections of gender composition and strategic management in organizations.

Regarding research on IDs, future research could add new knowledge to current literature from at least two directions. The first is the expected roles and functions of IDs. It’s critical to pay attention to the specific institutional and other contextual factors that shape the environment where the organizations and boards are situated. In western economies where the system of IDs originated and bloomed, the initial purpose was to enhance the monitoring role of board, in the wake of corporate governance crisis and scandals in 1970s (Gordon, 2007). But as globalization process and corporate governance reforms become increasingly intense for the last several decades, researchers have raised widely-held discussions on the strategic roles of IDs in organizations (see Pugliese et al., 2009 for a review) and how their voices matter in strategic decisions (e.g., Balsmeier, Buchwald, & Stiebale, 2014; Kim, Mauldin, & Patro, 2014). Similarly, when the established and well- developed practice of IDs was diffused from developed economies to emerging economies, some of the key contextual factors where the system has been developed also changed. For example, the conflicts between shareholders and managers might become less salient than the conflicts between majority shareholders and minority shareholders in listed companies, which is referred by corporate governance as “principal-principal” conflicts as opposed to the traditional “principal-agent” conflicts (see Young et al., 2008 for a review). Therefore, it demands special attention and efforts to explore the role of institutional factors and enrich our understanding of IDs’ duties and functions.

The other direction within IDs research lies in the motivations for IDs to take the position and the driving factors that lead to specific behavioral patterns of these individuals on corporate boards. In general, directors’ motivation is an important but underexplored research issue in corporate governance (Hambrick et al., 2008). Although there has been some development from economic perspective (e.g., Adams & Ferreira, 2008; Masulis & Mobbs, 2014), it has been mainly focusing on the issue in relation to IDs’ monitoring function. In contrast, it remains unclear what would be the drives for IDs to take the position, taking into consideration the time that they would spend on strategic decision making in organizations. In addition, even less attention has been paid to directors’ motivation in different institutional environment. For example, in emerging economies such as China, the

weak institutional environment and the short history of the implementation of ID system and other internal governance mechanisms together have resulted in the lack of mature labor market of IDs, where they are normally evaluated and selected based on their past performance (Masulis & Mobbs, 2014). Instead, social networks and connections (referred as guanxi, see Chen, Chen, & Huang (2013) for a review) are considered to be more important factors when appointing new IDs (Kim & Cannella, 2008). Therefore, in such environment, the motivations and incentives of IDs could also vary.

Second, we have also examined the behavioral processes of boards of directors and CEOs, with a focus on a more macro level by using a symbolic management perspective. Besides legal requirements, it’s also vital for organizations to comply with the normative pressures, such as good corporate governance practices (Hambrick et al., 2008). Therefore, organizations may use symbolic actions to manage the perceptions of stakeholders in order to achieve and maintain legitimacy from environments. Although the symbolic management perspective in corporate governance research has been developed for more than twenty years since the series of original studies (Westphal & Zajac, 1994, 1998a; Zajac & Westphal, 1995), most of the research has been conducted in a single institutional environment – USA. On the contrary, although institution plays a significant role in shaping the perceptions of stakeholders and shareholders about what constitutes good corporate governance, surprisingly little research has addressed its role, with only a few exceptions (Markóczy, Sun, Peng, Shi, & Ren, 2013).

Amongst the few studies to address the sparse research, our study takes into consideration the institutional factors in symbolic management and examines how founder CEO succession events in Chinese listed companies could be utilized as symbolic actions to satisfy the changing demands from external stakeholders and shareholders. Future research could contribute to the conversation both theoretically and empirically. For instance, researchers could examine how the institutional environment in emerging economies could alter the perceptions of stakeholders and shareholders and change the expectations about corporate governance in organizations and how the changed evaluation criteria of good governance practices could influence the symbolic actions taken in organizations. It would also be interesting to examine the issue in cross-cultural contexts. In the globalization process, an increasing number of organizations in emerging economies start to do business

and go listed in more developed economies. How they adapt to shared perceptions about good governance practices in a different context and use corresponding communication skills in corporate governance policies to meet the varied demands in different cultures and economies would also enrich our current understanding in symbolic management research.