Joining forces: Top management team and board chair characteristics as antecedents of board service involvement

Abstract

Boards in early stage high tech firms have an important role to play through their involvement in service tasks. Building on the attention based view of the firm and self-efficacy theory, we investigate the role of top management team (TMT) and board chair characteristics as antecedents of board service involvement (BSI). Studying a sample of 117 Norwegian early stage high tech firms, we find that TMT diversity positively affects BSI, whereas CEO duality negatively affects BSI. We further find that the industry experience of the board chair positively moderates the relationship between TMT size and BSI whereas CEO duality reinforces the TMT diversity-BSI relationship.