Accountability and Creating Accountability: a Framework for Exploring Behavioural Perspectives of Corporate Governance
| Date | 01 March 2005 |
| Published date | 01 March 2005 |
| Author | Morten Huse |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2005.00448.x |
Accountability and Creating
Accountability: a Framework for Exploring
Behavioural Perspectives of Corporate
Governance
Morten Huse
Department of Innovation and Economics, Norwegian School of Management BI, Norway
Email: morten.huse@bi.no
What is board accountability, and how is such accountability created? This response to
Roberts, McNulty and Stiles suggests a framework for exploring behavioural perspect-
ives of boards and corporate governance. The contribution of this framework is to
develop a terminology that may help us accumulate knowledge and provide directions
for a research agenda. The consistent use of a terminology, the accumulation of
knowledge and an accepted research agenda among a core group of scholar are some of
the first steps in developing a promising research field with considerable potential to
create actionable knowledge. The framework can help us sort some of the research,
concepts and anecdotes that have been presented in efforts to open the black box of
board research.
Research on corporate governance is now taking
various directions, and new streams of boards
and governance research are evolving. The article
‘Beyond Agency Conceptions of the Work of
Non-executive Directors: Creating Accountabil-
ity’, by Roberts, McNulty and Stiles (this issue)
may contribute as one of the building blocks in
developing a research stream on exploring
behavioural perspectives of boards.
Roberts, McNulty and Stiles explore various
aspects of the board accountability concept, and
they make an important distinction between
accountability and that of creating accountabil-
ity. The stories of experienced UK directors are
the empirical basis of the study. The authors of
the article ‘challenge[s] the dominant grip of
agency theory on governance research and
support the search for theoretical pluralism
and greater understanding of board processes
and dynamics’. Their contributions are in line
with the calls made by, for example, Daily,
Dalton and Cannella (2003) and Pettigrew
through a number of publications (e.g. Pettigrew,
1992; Pettigrew and McNulty, 1995).
Corporate governance research has, since the
beginning of the 1990s been dominated by a US
research tradition with a focus on protecting the
investors’ stakes. Roberts, McNulty and Stiles go
beyond these agency conceptions of the work of
the non-executive directors to define account-
ability. Board accountability is related to value
creation (Cadbury, 1992; Taylor, 2001). Roberts,
McNulty and Stiles use a pluralistic approach
to board accountability, and agency theory is
supplemented with other board role theories in
defining board role expectations. However, there
is a gap between board role expectations and
actual board task performance. I perceive that
the essence of Roberts, McNulty and Stiles’s
article is that creating accountability is about
bridging the gap between board role expectations
and actual board task performance. They argue
British Journal of Management, Vol. 16, S65–S79 (2005)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2005.00448.x
r2005 British Academy of Management
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