The Handbook of Board Governance, 3rd Edition

66The Seasons of a Director’s Effectiveness

Jill Brown, BA, PhD

Hieken Professor of Business Ethics and Professor of Management, Bentley University

Ann Mooney Murphy, BS, MBA, PhD

Associate Professor, School of Business, Stevens Institute of Technology

Andrew Ward, BSc, MBA, PhD

Charlot & Dennis E. Singleton ’66 Chair of Corporate Governance at Lehigh University

Boards of directors are tasked with the important responsibility of protecting the interests of a firm’s shareholders by performing the key functions of monitoring and advising management (Carpenter and Westphal, 2001). Individual directors contribute to these functions by working collectively with the board through activities such as board discussions, as well as through the individual contributions such as when they advise the CEO. While a large stream of research examines the effectiveness of the board (Boivie, Bednar, Aguilera, and Andrus, 2016; Dalton et al., 1998; John and Senget, 1998), it is only more recently that scholars have paid serious attention to individual director effectiveness. One pressing factor that has emerged from this work is the importance of considering directors’ effectiveness relative to their tenure on the board, with scholars showing a curvilinear relationship whereby it takes time for directors to reach their peak effectiveness period, and that at some point their effectiveness wanes as the risks of becoming stale and entrenched with management mount (Brown et al., 2017; Mooney, Brown, ...