Attendant, autonomous, audacious, and advisory boards: Catalyzing corporate environmental performance

Abstract

Boards of directors play important roles when responding to one of the biggest chal- lenges for companies today: environmental sustainability. Research has mainly been focused on the separate impacts of board structure, composition, and processes on corporate environmental performance. Understanding how these three dimensions of the board, which help to successfully fulfill the board roles, interact in complemen- tary or substitutive ways is crucial for improving companies' environmental perfor- mance. Using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis on a sample of 86 European-listed companies in greenhouse gas (GHG)-intensive sectors, our study shows that board dimensions and the attributes that shape them have complemen- tary or substitutable effects on corporate environmental performance. Specifically, we identified four board archetypes that arise from different configurations promot- ing environmental performance. Finally, we considered CEO-Board interaction, showing that both longer and shorter CEO tenures together with certain combina- tions of board attributes could be linked to higher environmental performance.