For decades, the makeup of company boards has long been fairly homogenous: a small number of top managers or wealthy business men connected by personal and professional jewelry. Recent cultural movements and good governance codes have encouraged or perhaps required businesses to improve their demographic variety (gender, racial/ethnic, nationality and age) in order to broaden the perspectives and knowledge of board members.
Before research shows that demographic vdr diversity boosts firm overall performance through increased monitoring and oversight abilities, increased stock cost informativeness, and higher likelihood of successful ideal change. Specifically, the evidence coming from studies centering on gender range shows that businesses with more women of all ages at the top level outperform the ones without (Ahmed and Ali, 2017; Gul et al., 2019).
Yet , the benefits of market diversity may not be universal. Our selection interviews with current and former board members show that, whilst increasing the amount of women, hispanics and youthful directors on the board may make it a lot less skewed in terms of gender or age, this does not necessarily lead to better cognitive diversity.
The main reason could be the fact that new company directors recruited to further improve demographic multiplicity have experience and expertise that are similar to those of existing members, therefore not having a more varied perspective for the boardroom. Alternatively, it is possible the different viewpoints and insights brought by diverse mother board members will be distorted or suppressed simply by communication design and social rules within the boardroom.
The solution could lie in changing the culture on the board. This may involve cultivating a more egalitarian boardroom traditions that elevates and prices contrasting views and opinions, instead of relying on trivial measures these kinds of while demographic qualities to measure cognitive diversity.
