Is a Board of Directors a Team?

	Board of directors	Typical teams
Composition	All non-executive directors, a mix of non-executive and executive directors, or all executive directors	All executives
Affiliation	Work for several organisations, possibly full time in one organisation	Work for the same organisation
Interaction	Spend relatively little time together	Spend a lot of time together
Time and information	Limited time, with information dependence on management	Immersed in day-to-day activities
Leaders as members	More likely to have leadership experience	Less likely to have leadership experience
Roles	Govern	Manage
Authority relationships	Boards have ultimate authority in law, which systemic contextual issues may constrain	CEO has authority under delegations from the board. Other executive team members have more limited authority
Accountability	Hold executives to account	Accountable to the board
Structure	Horizontal authority structure (Vandewaerde et al., 2011)	Vertical authority structure
Average team size	Larger	Smaller
Formality	Boards operate formally (see Dynamic)	Managers operate informally (see Dynamic)
Dynamic (Brennan et al., 2016, p. 145)	“Rules of the road”	“Rush hour”
Socialise	Occasionally	Regularly
Familiarity	Do not know each other well	Know each other quite/fairly well

[i] Source: Adapted from Nadler et al. (2006) and Levrau (2007)

Table 2

Paradoxes of boards of directors

Role	Conflicting role
Boards are collegial groups	More and more discussion is delegated to board committees
Boards need to have collegial chemistry	Boards need to be diverse
Boards reach consensus fully supported by the whole board	Independent “free thinking” non-executive directors promote critical and constructive dissent
Boards engage in collective decision making based on effective group dynamics	Board decisions must be based on a diverse set of individual opinions
Boards must work together as a team	Boards must avoid groupthink
Truly independent directors	Annual election/ad nutum dismissal (power of dismissal without justification)
Boards need to build trust	Boards need to be vigilant on verification
Executive directors are peers of non-executive directors on the board	Non-executive directors monitor executives
Board members direct	Board members monitor
Non-executive directors are advisors/mentors to senior management	Non-executive directors are critical monitors of senior management
Board members support executives	Board members challenge executives
Boards’ duties and time commitment are increasing exponentially	Remuneration of non-executive directors is not keeping pace
Boards take decisions behind closed doors; Confidentially is a legal obligation	Increasing demands for transparency
Non-executive directors depend on the CEO for information	Non-executive directors have the same legal responsibilities even though they know less about the company than the executive directors
Non-executive directors have less company-specific information than executive directors	If non-executive directors have as much company-specific information as executive directors, they could not do their job (Brennan et al., 2016)
The conformance role requires monitoring and scrutiny and is risk-averse	The performance role requires vision, in-depth understanding, and an appetite for risk
Directors on a collegial board are equal	Executive directors (e.g., CFO) other than the CEO are day-to-day subordinates to the CEO, yet cannot act as subordinates on the board.

[i] (Source: Adapted by the author from a wide range of board-of-directors’ literature)

Applying Wageman et al.'s (2005) team diagnostic survey to a board-of-directors’ context (text in italics)

Table 3

Two contrasting board-of-directors’ models

Forbes and Milliken (1999) model of board-of-director effectiveness		Vandewaerde et al. (2011) model of shared leadership in the boardroom
	Board characteristics	1.	Human capital heterogeneity
1.	Board demography	2.	Chairman behaviour
2.	Knowledge and skills	3.	Individual and team conditions: Affective
	Board processes	4.	Individual and team conditions: Cognitive
3.	Cognitive conflict	5.	Individual and team conditions: Behavioural
4.	Effort norms	6.	Task complexity
5.	Use of knowledge and skills	7.	Task interdependence
	Board-level/Firm-level outcomes	8.	Shared leadership
6.	Cohesiveness	9.	Behavioural control
7.	Task performance (control and service)	10.	Output control
8.	Firm performance	11.	Advice
		12.	Networking

Classifying boards of directors by boardroom conflict/dissent
Source: Compiled from Heemskerk et al. (2017, p. 239)

Table 4

Questions for future research concerning boards as teams

Context	When do boards benefit from teamwork versus individualistic behaviour in boardrooms? How does the type of entity (e.g., listed company, non-government organisation, state-owned entity, etc.) influence group behaviour? How does board context influence group behaviour?
Boards as teams	What are the unique features of boards as teams? What factors influence boards’ propensity to operate as teams?
Board task performance	What board tasks benefit from teamwork? How does teamwork enhance board task performance? How does the need for transparency, accountability, diversity, inclusion impede or enhance teamwork?
Board dynamic	How is board dynamic enhanced/diminished by boards working as teams? How do boards operating as teams improve/dis-improve board effectiveness? How do boards’ intragroup dynamics differ from other teams?
Psychology	What is the relation between teamwork and groupthink? How do interactions among team members influence cognitive and affective behaviours? How does the team leader (board chair? CEO?) influence board members’ behaviour?