Cyber risk has become one of the greatest threats to firms in recent years. Accordingly, boards of directors must be continually vigilant about this danger. They have a duty to ensure that the companies adopt appropriate cybersecurity measures to manage the risk of cyber fraud. Boards should also ensure that the firm disclose material cyber risk and breaches. We examine how the board’s gender composition can influence the extent of such disclosure, based on a sample of the companies listed on (...) the S&P/TSX 60 Index over the period 2014–2018. Results show evidence of a positive association between the presence and level of cybersecurity disclosure and board gender diversity. However, the board must boast a critical mass of at least three women before this positive impact can be observed. Our findings contribute to the debate on the importance of gender diversity by adding the concept of the positive influence of heterogeneity on cyber disclosure. We also augment the literature on the critical mass of women in boardrooms by providing empirical evidence that three or more women constitute the threshold for better governance. Our study has important implications for investors, stakeholders and regulators. If investors wish to increase cybersecurity disclosure, they should ask for more diversified boards. Our findings support regulators in their efforts to increase women’s representation on boards by providing empirical evidence of better outcomes with this type of board composition. (shrink)

From a simple idea to unite asset owners in their quest for responsible investment at its launch in April 2006, the United Nations supported Principles for Responsible Investment have grown in just one decade into an initiative with more than 1500 fee-paying signatories. Jointly, the PRI’s signatories hold assets worth more than $80 trillion, making it one of the more prevalent not-for-profit organizations worldwide. Furthermore, the PRI’s ambitious mission to transform the financial system at large into a more sustainable one (...) makes it a worthwhile subject of inquiry from an institutional perspective. We undertake an empirical investigation of the adoption of the PRI by asset owners during five crucial years of the association’s emergence: 2007–2011. Following a tripartite view of institutional theory proposed by Scott, we explore if regulative, normative, and cultural–cognitive factors influence an asset owner’s decision to subscribe to the PRI. Applying both parametric and non-parametric survival analysis, we find that asset owners are indeed significantly affected by normative, cultural–cognitive, and regulative aspects. In particular, public service employee and labor union pension funds from social backgrounds more culturally aligned with values represented by the RI movement with historically more voluntary legislation on environmental, social, and governance issues are most likely to sign the PRI. In contrast, institutional environments with a higher number of pre-existing mandatory ESG regulation decrease the likelihood of signing the PRI. Our results indicate that normative and cultural–cognitive factors were crucial contributors to the PRI’s growth. With respect to the regulative environments, our results imply that some asset owners may use the PRI as a collective industry initiative to substitute for mandatory legislation. Conversely, a high level of historical mandatory legislation may constrain organizational resources that could otherwise be dedicated to voluntary initiatives such as PRI. Our findings are robust to relevant controls and econometric concerns. (shrink)

This study analyzes how the board’s characteristics could be associated with globally corporate social responsibility CSR and specific areas of CSR. It is drawn on all listed firms, in 2016, on the SBF120 between 2003 and 2016. Our results provide strong evidence that diversity in boards and diversity of boards globally are positively associated with corporate social performance. However, they influence differently specific dimensions of CSR performance. First, we show that large boards are positively associated with all areas of CSR (...) performance, while specific and overall CSR scores are negatively associated with CEO-chair structures. Second, board gender diversity is positively associated with human rights and corporate governance dimensions. Third, age diversity is positively associated with corporate governance, human resources, human rights, and environmental activities. Also, our results provide evidence that outside directors care about CSR performance. Specifically, the presence of foreign directors is positively associated with environmental performance and community involvement, whereas CSR-Governance dimension is positively associated with the presence of independent directors. Regarding the director’s educational level, post-graduated directors are positively and significantly associated with overall CSR score and all CSR sub-scores, except the corporate governance one. When directors have multiple directorships, they are more concerned about human resources, environmental performance, and business ethics. Finally, our findings are robust only in non-family firms. In fact, family boards are less diverse than non-family ones; specifically, they have a lower number of independent, foreign, and high-educated directors. (shrink)

This paper presents a literature review offering a thorough and critical systematization of articles investigating the influence of women directors on corporate social performance (CSP). We review the state-of-the-art literature in terms of its key assumptions, theories, and conceptualization of CSP. Our analysis shows a misfit between the theorization and operationalization of gender diversity, especially in quantitative empirical studies, which represent the majority of articles. In our overview of both conceptual and empirical studies, we identified three main theoretical dimensions, which (...) are contingent upon board-level and institution-level dimensions. Based on our proposed framework, we call for future researchers to focus on novel research questions and innovative research designs to investigate women’s contributions to CSP and challenge the theoretical assumptions about the role of women on boards. (shrink)

More and more firms have a chief sustainability officer (CSO) to support the organizational focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Yet, there is much to learn about the boundary conditions that make the presence of CSOs particularly effective for firms’ CSR. Using an attention-based view lens, we investigate the relationship between having a CSO as attention carrier of CSR activities and examine the potential boundary conditions related to the three attention principles (attention selection, represented by board diversity; attention structures, represented (...) by a CSR committee; and situated attention, represented by country-level CSR standards). We test our hypotheses using a global sample of 3,470 firms across 54 countries. Our results show that the influence of the CSO on internal and external CSR is most important in the absence of attention principles that may act as alternative attention carriers of CSR. In other words, attention principles form boundaries to the CSO’s influence on internal and external CSR. Our study contributes to research on the attention-based view, CSOs, and CSR. (shrink)

This article examines the impact of female leadership on corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in publicly traded corporations. Our analysis finds that female leadership matters. For example, female leadership at the board level increases the likelihood of having a female CEO and the overall percentage of women executives in firms. The study measures CSR practices using the Thomson Reuters corporate responsibility ratings (TRCRR) from the Thomson Reuters ASSET4 database for 1242 firms over a 7-year period, from 2009 to 2015. Panel (...) regression estimates indicate that board gender diversity (BGD) has a positive impact on CSR, while two other measures of female leadership (presence of female CEO and percentage of female executives) were largely insignificant. We perform our analysis in the context of upper echelons theory and expand on recent studies of the impact of female leadership on CSR practices by using a different and a larger data set than previous research studies. (shrink)

This study examines the role of responsible entrepreneurship among female entrepreneurs by examining how and when responsible entrepreneurship may exert a positive influence on female entrepreneurial success. Using the data collected from 337 Chinese female entrepreneurs, and by integrating responsible entrepreneurship research with a dynamic capability framework, our findings show, firstly, that responsible entrepreneurship is positively correlated to female entrepreneurial success; secondly, this relationship is mediated by female entrepreneurs’ opportunity recognition; and thirdly, the indirect effect of responsible entrepreneurship on female (...) entrepreneurial success through opportunity recognition is weaker when women entrepreneurs perceive more gender discrimination. Furthermore, using a post hoc analysis, we find that responsible entrepreneurship has a positive impact on entrepreneurial success for both male and female entrepreneurs, but that this impact is more significant for female entrepreneurs than for their male counterparts. With the contextual factor of traditional female social stereotypes inadvertently contributing to greater gender discrimination in the field of entrepreneurship, our results underscore the importance of both responsible entrepreneurship and opportunity recognition in promoting female entrepreneurial success. (shrink)

Reporting peers’ counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs) is important for maintaining an ethical organization, but is a significant and potentially risky action. In Bandura’s Theory of Moral Thought and Action (Bandura, 1991) he states that such acts require significant moral agency, which is generated when an individual possesses adequate moral self-regulatory capacities to address the issue and is in a context that activates and reinforces those capacities. Guided by this theory, we assess moral potency (i.e., moral courage, moral efficacy, and moral (...) ownership) as key capacities predicting peer reporting intentions and assess three contextual factors influencing the generation and effects of moral potency: whether a potential informant (1) works for an ethical leader, (2) is embedded in a psychologically safe climate promoting interpersonal risk-taking, and (3) operates in a more normal or extreme context. We assess the proposed model across three field studies entailing both normal and extreme (i.e., firefighting units) contexts. Results show that ethical leaders raise employees’ moral potency, promoting greater willingness to report their peers’ CWBs. In normal work contexts, psychological safety positively moderated both the relationship between ethical leadership and moral potency and between moral potency and peer reporting intentions. However, psychological safety had the opposite effects in more extreme work contexts. Whereas psychological safety strengthens the positive association between moral potency and peer reporting intentions in normal work contexts, in contexts where individuals are more frequently exposed to extreme events, psychological safety weakens this relationship, thus highlighting the unforeseen downsides of psychological safety in extreme contexts. (shrink)

This study examines how the CSR committee and CSR-linked executive compensation jointly affect CSR performance as governance mechanisms. Prior studies provided mixed results on the CSR committee’s effect on CSR performance. We posit that a CSR committee has both a direct and an indirect positive effect on CSR performance, with CSR-linked compensation playing the role of mediator in the relationship. We base our analysis on a sample of 164 Canadian firms covering the period 2012–2018, for a total of 952 firm-year (...) observations. We propose a regression-based approach for our mediation research design. Our findings reveal that CSR-linked compensation mediates the CSR committee’s positive effect on performance, but the type of mediation depends on whether the performance is social or environmental. We provide evidence of both direct and indirect effects on environmental performance but only a positive indirect effect on social performance. These results suggest that demands from the firm’s internal and external stakeholders are treated differently, with the former receiving priority. (shrink)

This study investigates whether audit partner gender is associated with the extent of auditor disclosure and the communication style regarding risks of material misstatements that are classified as key audit matters. Using a sample of UK firms during the 2013–2017 period, our results suggest that female audit partners are more likely than male audit partners to disclose more KAMs with more details after controlling for both client and audit firm attributes. Furthermore, female audit partners are found to use a less (...) optimistic tone and provide less readable audit reports, compared to their male counterparts, suggesting that behavioural variances between female and male audit partners may have significant implications on their writing style. Therefore, this study offers new insights on the role of audit partner gender in extended audit reporting. Our findings have important implications for audit firms, investors, policymakers and governments in relation to the development, implementation and enforcement of gender diversity. (shrink)