What’s age got to do with it? The effect of board member age diversity: a systematic review

Abstract

The current research is a systematic review of 54 empirical papers from 1996 to 2022 which aim to investigate whether board member age diversity influences a firm’s financial and non-financial outcomes. Analysis of the extant research reveals board member age diversity to be an inconsistent predictor of both the financial and non-financial performance of a firm. Apart from CSR performance, which was found to more consistently be positively associated with age diversity, most studies included in the review failed to identify age diversity as a significant predictor of firm outcomes, however several positive, negative and curvilinear relationships were found by some studies. The lack of a consistent trend of significant associations may indicate that age diverse boards perform no better or worse than non-diverse boards or, more likely, given the inconsistent pattern of results, this research highlights that there may be other factors, such as team processes or task characteristics, which differentially impact whether age diversity has a positive, negative, curvilinear or no effect on outcomes. The current work is the first to systematically evaluate the available data on board age diversity and provides a clear account of what is known and what is not known about the relationship between board member age diversity and financial and non-financial outcomes. This study offers important insights and practical recommendations to researchers, HRM practitioners and policy makers interested in understanding how board composition factors influence the performance of corporate boards.