Boards Activity in Large Italian Companies. A Behavioural Perspective

In this article we present behavioural antecedents of board activity. We define board activity as the involvement of the board in various tasks such as control, advice, network and strategy. We adopt a behavioural perspective and hypothesize that three board attributes, i.e., board diversity, the commitment of the board members, and cognitive conflict among the board members, positively impact on the level of board activity. Our model was tested on a sample of 301 large manufacturing Italian corporations. The results support that commitment and diversity positively impact on the level of board activity; on the other hand, we did not find in the overall analysis that cognitive conflict significantly influenced board activity. However, further investigation showed that cognitive conflict may exert significant influence on some of the specific tasks of the board. Our findings suggest that behavioural attributes may shed light on what determines board activities; moreover, they suggest that future study should pay more attention to the specific tasks of the board.