Boards of Directors and Strategic Management: Public Firms and New Ventures

This chapter examines contemporary theory and research on boards of directors in strategic management. After briefly reviewing the evolution of research on corporate boards and strategic management, we describe contemporary theoretical perspectives and emerging topics in the literature, and identify a variety of future research opportunities. We then turn to recent research in the rapidly growing literature on venture boards and strategy. Our review of recent work on boards of public companies and new ventures reveals a common emphasis on behavioral processes in the boardroom, in dyadic CEO-board interactions outside the boardroom, and in relations between directors and external constituents. We describe numerous opportunities to extend these complementary literatures by linking behavioral processes in boards to issues of diversity, technology and innovation, culture and institutions, and competitive strategy.