The determinants of trust in the boardroom

Abstract

Studies on the relationship between board compositional characteristics and performance have remained elusive after decades of research (Dalton et al., 1998; Forbes and Milliken, 1999). Scholars have argued that such research is akin to treating the board as a ‘black box’ without investigating what actually happens inside the boardroom (Huse, 1998, 2007; Pettigrew, 1992; Pettigrew and McNulty, 1995). More recent research has therefore moved towards behavioural perspectives on boards (Forbes and Milliken, 1999; Hambrick et al., 2008; Huse, 2007; Huse et al., 2011). These behavioural studies draw on a wider range of theoretical concepts in order to capture and examine the socio-psychological processes that occur in the boardroom (Westphal and Zajac, 2013). Moreover, the behavioural research stream has eschewed traditional archival data-based methods that have dominated the conventional research on corporate boards and instead given preference to data and methods that have allowed researchers to get closer to actual behaviours and interactions in the boardroom (Bailey and Peck, 2011; Huse and Zattoni, 2008; Machold and Farquhar, 2013; Minichilli et al., 2009, 2012; Pye, 2001; Pugliese et al., 2015; Zona and Zattoni, 2007).