Beyond the Black Box of Demography: Board Processes and Task Effectiveness within Italian Firms

In this paper we analyze boards of directors as workgroups, i.e., groups of people that perform one or more tasks within an organizational context. Building on previous studies, we developed a model that relates group’s social-psychological processes to three different board tasks: service, monitoring, and networking. We tested our model through a survey on 301 large manufacturing firms in Italy. Our findings support the idea that (a) process variables and, to a limited extent, demographic variables significantly influence board task performance; (b) board processes have a different impact on each specific board task; (c) board task performance varies depending upon firm and industry characteristics.