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This paper addresses three weaknesses in the literature on new organizational forms: the limited mapping of the extent of contemporary organizational change; confusion about how contemporary changes link together; and the lack of systematic testing of the performance consequences of this kind of change. Drawing on a large-scale survey of organizational innovation in European firms, the paper finds widespread but not revolutionary change in terms of organization structure, processes, and boundaries. Using the economics notion of complementarities, the paper develops contingency and configurational approaches to suggest that organizational innovations will tend to cluster in particular ways and that the performance benefits of these innovations depend on their clustering. Complementarities in performance are explored from both inductive and deductive perspectives. Consistent with the expectations of complementarity theory, high-performing firms appeared to be innovating more and differently than low-performing firms. Again consistent with complementarities, piecemeal changes—with the exception of IT—were found to deliver little performance benefit, while exploitation of the full set of innovations was associated with high performance. Though few European firms were found to exploit the complementarities of new organizational practices, those that did enjoyed high-performance premia.

For a sample of 210 Swiss publicly listed firms we analyse the characteristics of all 1678 directors in the year 2003 in order to investigate how board members' nationality and gender interact with directors' level of independence, number of other directorships and demographic characteristics. Our results suggest that whereas foreign directors tend to be more independent, women directors are more likely to be affiliated to firm management through family ties and that foreign directors hold significantly lower numbers of directorships at other Swiss boards. Female and foreign directors also differ in terms of educational background, educational level, age and board tenure. Some of our gender diversity findings are different from previous research. We conclude that in order to manage diversity on corporate boards it is imperative to understand the characteristics, qualifications and affiliations that these directors bring to the boardroom and that it is important to take national circumstances into account rather than relying on research results from other countries. Copyright (c) 2007 The Authors; Journal compilation (c) 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Boards of directors have a number of roles. The board's monitoring function has been the subject of much work. Less examined is the role that the board has in setting company strategy. This paper uses agency and network perspectives in developing and testing the relationship between board characteristics and involvement in strategic decision making. Using primary and secondary data, our results suggest that the level of board involvement in strategic decision making is related to a number of governance variables. We demonstrate that involvement is generally lower where boards are highly interlocked. We also show that certain types of board interlocks -namely horizontal (same industry) and those involving direct links with the banking sector -are particularly associated with this negative effect. There is weaker evidence that board strategic involvement is lower where the roles of company chief executive and chair are combined. We find no evidence that factors such as board size, or the percentage of outside directors per se are related to board involvement in strategic decision making. In doing so, this paper adds to the growing literature synthesizing the structural features and processes of boards.