Do Academics Make Good Directors?
Editor’s note: We are pleased to welcome Guclu Atinc of Drake University. His paper “An Investigation of the Impact of Academicians as Directors,” co-authored by Mark Kroll of The University of Texas at Brownsville and Bruce Walters of Louisiana Tech University, is forthcoming in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies and now available in the journal’s OnlineFirst section.
As a corporate governance researcher, one of the topics I am interested in is board composition. As an academician, I thought it would be interesting to investigate whether the presence of academicians as independent board members impacts organizational outcomes.
We expected academician directors to influence board vigilance and accounting performance. Based on our results, that was not the case. However, our results also showed that organizations with academician directors are valued more favorably by the market players. That finding was surprising and worthy of note for the board composition literature.
Due to recent regulatory developments, such as the Sarbanes Oxley Act 2002, and new research findings published in premier outlets of the management field, directors are now considered to be more essential for strategic decision making. To our knowledge, presence of academicians as board members was not assessed by previous researchers. I believe that our manuscript is a good starting point. In the future, researchers may further investigate this area. Practitioners may find our paper useful when they are looking into the effect of different board compositions. They may be particularly interested in nominating academicians as potential independent board members.
Read the article, “An Investigation of the Impact of Academicians as Directors,” online in the Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies.
Guclu Atinc is an Assistant Professor of Management at Drake University. He received his doctoral degree from Louisiana Tech University in Strategic Management. His current research interests are in the area of upper echelons and boards of directors in young entrepreneurial firms and the impact of environment in strategic decision making. His research appeared in journals like Organizational Research Methods, Journal of Managerial Issues and Journal of Business Strategies.
