MORE THAN A FEELING: HOW BOARD MEMBERDISPLAYS OF ANGER AND HAPPINESS INFLUENCESTRATEGIC DECISIONS

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: van den Oever, Koen; Shropshire, Christine
• 署名单位: Radboud University Nijmegen; Arizona State University; Arizona State University-Tempe
• 刊物名称: ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT JOURNAL
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0001-4273
• DOI: 10.5465/amj.2022.1075
• 发表日期: 2024
• 页码: 1525-1552
• 关键词: SOCIAL FUNCTIONS; TOP MANAGEMENT; organizational performance; EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIONS; corporate governance; sensitivity-analysis; firm performance; Agency problems; DIRECTOR; diversity

摘要

To examine board members' influence in strategic decision-making, we consider the roleof emotion displays during board meetings. We build a grounded model of how boardmembers influence strategic decisions, which can occur directly from one director to atop manager or indirectly from one board member through the rest of the board. Drawingfrom the literature on nonverbal communication, we theorize that displays of anger andhappiness by board members increase their focused or diffuse influence, respectively,over strategic decisions proposed by top management. We further hypothesize that theduration of the discussion moderates these main effects. Analyses on 366 agenda itemsfrom 68 board meetings of four Dutch water management organizations support our pre-dictions that board member emotional displays indeed impact strategic decision out-comes via focused and diffuse influence processes. Our results also suggest that the duration of an agenda item's discussion attenuates the association between board mem-bers'displayed anger and their focused influence. These findings offer insights and new avenues for research in corporate governance, emotions, and communications, and have implications for our scholarly and practical understanding of how board members influence strategic decisions