Boards of directors and corporate financial performance: A review and integrative model

How do boards of directors influence corporate financial performance? This question has aroused interest over the past five decades in such diverse disciplines as management, economics, finance, and sociology, but with contradictory findings. The resulting research has contributed to a growing awareness of the need to understand better how boards can improve their effectiveness as instruments of corporate governance through refinements in their composition, their internal organization, and the processes they follow in making decisions.