Abstract
PurposeCorporate success depends partially on the quality of knowledge accessible to the executive board. One route of access to such knowledge is the appointment of directors who already hold directorships with prominent other corporate actors. Such director appointments provide interlocks to a corporate knowledge ecosystem (Haunschild and Beckman, 1998). The purpose of this paper is to examine how linkages between companies belonging to different sectors impact firm performance and to examine how linkages created by female directors, as opposed to male directors, shape performance.Design/methodology/approachThis paper investigates the interlocks created between UK FTSE 350 companies from 2010 to 2018. It draws on network analysis to map the roles that male and female directors play in linking firms with varying sector classifications. The paper provides an examination of the impact of these roles on firm performance, through a panel data regression analysis.FindingsThis paper finds that there is an increase of inter-industry brokers over the period, and that men are still dominant in both the network and creating inter-industry ties amongst companies. However, the role of women in establishing these ties appears to be changing, and women are more important when it comes to create inter-industry ties among key economic sectors.Originality/valueThis paper provides a novel approach to examine the interplay between gendered inter (and intra) sectoral linkages and firm performance. It provides an original application of the two-mode brokerage analysis framework proposed in Jasny and Lubell (2015).
Highlights
Interlocking directorates happen when a director who is affiliated with one company sits on the board of directors of another
Based on the topology we introduced earlier, we count the number of brokerage chains in our networks and classify them based on the type of chain
We proposed two hypotheses regarding the impact of gender intersectoral firm ties on performance
Summary
Interlocking directorates happen when a director who is affiliated with one company sits on the board of directors of another. Interlocks are no longer seen as a controlling mechanism but as a knowledge transfer mechanism. This has been associated to resource dependency theory (Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978), where interlocks can be seen as a source of information, reducing uncertainty for companies. We construct this work on the assumption that interlocks act as transfer mechanisms between companies. We investigate the gender composition of the boards when interlocks can facilitate a knowledge transfer mechanism between companies belonging to various sectors.
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