The implications of board nationality and gender diversity: evidence from a qualitative comparative analysis

This study extends research on the board nationality and gender diversity to a new, unchartered, methodological territory of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). QCA is based on Boolean algebra and facilitates the application of set-theoretic reasoning to the data analysis. This work adds to the repository of academic studies, which put forward a ‘business case’ for the board nationality and gender diversity in terms of their positive impact on the board outcomes. Based on the upper echelons theory and the ‘value-in-diversity’ proposition, we assess the influence of board nationality and gender diversity on board commitment, which is measured with two proxies: the annual number of board meetings and board evaluation. The findings indicate that both board nationality and gender diversity are part of the intermediate solutions for the outcome variable. The impact of both variables on board commitment is typically detected in large firms that are internationalised but not product-diversified, the boards of which tend to be small. These results confirm that the increasing emphasis on ensuring significant board nationality/ethnic and gender diversity in board composition within the regulatory documents on corporate governance represents a step in the right direction.