Independent directors in Asian firms: An integrative review and future directions.

Asian firms started to adopt independent directors (InDs) to boards only in the late 1990s after the Asian financial crisis. Despite its relatively short history, Asian firms’ practice of appointing InDs has yielded interesting research findings that may shed new light on the corporate governance literature and management research. However, the literature on InDs in Asian firms has been presented in a piecemeal fashion, which calls for researchers to review and synthesize the disparate findings and identify paths for future research. In this review paper, we identify and systematically analyze 65 articles related to InDs in the Asian context that were published in 21 leading academic journals from 2001 to 2016. Based on this analysis, we developed a framework with four links to map out the Asian InDs-related literature. We also discuss the limitation of the existing research and suggest future research direction on InDs in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]