Diversity as an Organizational Capability: A Multilevel Examination of Board Composition and Firm Effectiveness

在越来越多的立法使上市公司董事会多样化的过程中，对这种多样性为什么重要的见解仍然相对停滞不前。一些州已经制定了要求，要求上市公司的董事会在性别、种族和性取向方面变得更加多样化，或者提供公司在发展和保持董事会多样性方面做出更广泛承诺的证据。然而，尽管研究人员已经探索了董事会人口构成对业绩的影响，但由于很少关注这种关系发生的机制，研究结果仍然模棱两可。本项目试图填补多样性和战略文献中的这一空白，以推进对公司治理多样性价值和多样性的见解。本项目以董事会人口统计学多样性通过基于经验的多样性影响组织绩效为中心假设，将研究董事人口统计学特征和基于经验的特征对组织战略行动和财务绩效的影响。该项目将利用2007年至2017年十年间美国约1500家上市公司的董事和董事会特征数据。这些数据以及有关公司治理质量、战略选择和公司绩效的数据将从多个数据库获得，包括BoardEx、CompuStat、机构股东服务公司（ISS）、RavenPack新闻分析公司和摩根士丹利资本国际公司（MSCI）。董事数据将被汇总并与公司层面的数据相结合，以估计董事会多样性变量对公司组织行为和绩效的影响。总的来说，这个项目为理解价值创造和获取提供了一个综合的、基于过程的视角，因为它与董事会多样性有关。通过鼓励和建立一个未来的研究议程，以一种更系统的方法来研究董事会多样性和公司绩效，这个项目有可能提高未来公司层面多样性研究的解释力和实际用途。更广泛地说，该项目有可能在学术界和工业界之间建立与多样性有关的伙伴关系，并改变组织处理多样性的方式。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

In the midst of increasing legislation to diversify the boards of publicly held organizations, insight into why such diversity matters has remained relatively stagnant. Several states have instituted requirements that the boards of public companies become more diverse in terms gender, race, and sexual orientation or provide evidence of the company’s broader commitment to developing and maintaining board diversity. Yet, while researchers have explored the performance impacts of board demographic composition, the findings remain equivocal given little attention to the mechanisms through which such relationships occur. This project endeavors to fill this gap within the diversity and strategy literatures to advance insight into the value of and for diversity in corporate governance. With a central hypothesis that board demographic diversity impacts organizational performance through experience-based diversity, this project will examine the effects of director demographic and experienced-based characteristics on organizational strategic actions and financial performance. The project will utilize data on director and board characteristics across approximately 1,500 publicly traded firms in the U.S. over a ten-year period from 2007-2017. These data along with data on firm governance quality, strategic choices and firm performance will be obtained from several databases, including BoardEx, CompuStat, the Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS),RavenPack News Analytics, and Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI). Director data will be aggregated and combined with firm-level data to estimate the effects of board diversity variables on firm organizational actions and performance. Overall, this project offers an integrative, process-based perspective for understanding value creation and capture as it pertains to board diversity. By encouraging and establishing a future research agenda for a more systemic approach to the study of board diversity and firm performance, this project has the potential for enhancing the explanatory power and practical usefulness of future firm-level diversity research. More broadly, project has the potential for building diversity-related partnerships between academia and industry and transforming the ways in which organizations approach diversity.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.