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The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted nearly every boardroom in the world. However, neither the extant leadership literature nor the corporate governance literature offers succinct guidance on what constitutes effective board leadership during such a calamity. To address this theoretical and practical need, we develop a moderated mediation model, in which directive leadership from the board chair promotes competitive simplification at the onset of the crisis, which in turn promotes firm financial performance during the crisis. Using survey responses from 120 directors of U.S. public firms in Spring of 2020, combined with firm-level archival data from multiple sources and time periods, we find support for this mediated relationship—but only if the chair is not CEO. If the chair is CEO, we find no evidence of a positive relationship between directive leadership and either competitive simplification or firm financial performance; rather, we find some evidence of a negative relationship. We explore the implications of these findings for the theory and practice of corporate governance and crisis management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Summary: Human coding of unstructured text can enable scholars to measure complex latent constructs for use in empirical analysis, but also requires substantial time and resources that limit the number and sample sizes of studies using this approach. We demonstrate how supervised machine learning (ML) can overcome these constraints by allowing scholars to scale human‐coded data. Using board leadership as an illustrative context, we apply this method to create a large‐scale dataset (N = 22,388) from smaller scale human codings of CEO duality and board chair orientations from company proxy statements. We further demonstrate the potential value of this approach by using the resulting dataset to examine the relationships among board leadership, firm performance, and CEO dismissal. The ML code and dataset are available at 10.5281/zenodo.7304697. Managerial Summary: Manually converting unstructured text into usable data requires considerable time and resources. This article outlines a replicable process for applying supervised machine learning (ML) to overcome these constraints by scaling manually coded data. While ML is often used to identify patterns or predict relationships within a given dataset, we show how scholars and practitioners can build valuable custom algorithms at an earlier stage in the process—when first building a dataset. We illustrate this approach by training ML algorithms to replicate human codings of CEO duality and board chair control and collaboration orientations from over 22,000 company filings. We then show how this approach can support new knowledge development by using these data to explore the relationships among board leadership, company performance, and CEO dismissal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research summary: Scholars have traditionally conceptualized board leadership as a dichotomous construct. A combined CEO and board chair position is interpreted as reflecting a more collaborative approach to corporate governance, whereas separate positions are interpreted as ensuring greater board control. I challenge this conceptualization and posit that a separate board chair can be oriented toward collaboration as well as-or in place of-control. I analyze newly available data from corporate proxy statements to identify these two board chair orientations and test competing perspectives on how they impact profitability growth in a sample of S&P 500 firms. The results indicate that board leadership is a more nuanced phenomenon than the extant literature would suggest. Managerial summary: What is the role of the board chair when not the CEO? Corporate governance experts assert the board chair's role is to monitor and control the CEO. Yet, board chairs often play another, more collaborative role. Board chairs frequently provide advice and guidance to CEOs and relieve CEOs of board leadership burdens, enabling the CEOs to focus on their primary responsibilities. In this study, I examine the effect of board chair orientations on financial performance and find that, as with separating or joining the CEO and board chair positions, the profitability implications of the selected orientation are far from universal. Board chairs must consider their firm's performance context in order to get the most out of a particular approach to being the CEO's boss. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, many firms have chosen to separate their CEO and board chair positions. Prior research has demonstrated that there are three forms that a CEO-board chair separation can take: apprentice, departure, and demotion. In this paper, we examine the antecedents of these three types. Our results show that the three types of separation each have different profiles in terms of the prior performance of the firm, the independence of the board, and the career horizon of the incumbent CEO. The findings in this paper provide unique insights into the factors that drive boards' structural choices. As questions about board leadership structure become more nuanced and more relevant in both scholarship and practice, a full understanding of these factors will only become more important. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CEO duality—the practice of a single individual serving as both CEO and board chair—has been the subject of academic interest for more than 20 years. In that time, boards’ use of CEO duality has fluctuated and the scholarly conceptualizations of the phenomenon have become more complex. As such, the need to understand CEO duality has only increased with time. We review and integrate the disparate literature on this topic so that future attempts to study it will benefit from a more complete understanding of the knowledge already produced. We review the demonstrated antecedents and consequences of CEO duality, pointing out that while much work has been done in this area, much remains that we do not understand. Finally, we offer new theoretical, methodological, and contextual directions that researchers could explore to extend knowledge about CEO duality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]