Diversity of Czech and German Corporate Boards: Experience From MNCs
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Management Leadership and Governance (ECMLG 2016) |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Management and administrative |
| Keywords | Corporate Governance; Age diversity; Nationality diversity; Gender diversity; German Headquarters; Czech Subsidiaries; ROA |
| Description | The paper presents a basic comparison of diversity in managing and supervisory boards among Czech and German multinational companies (MNC´s). Diversity is nowadays widely discussed topic, which is also reflected in corporate governance (CG) area. Age, gender and nationality diversity has real impact on the decision-making process, transfer of knowledge and experience, and therefore on overall profitability of businesses. The aim of our paper is to introduce the issue of age, gender and nationality composition of supervisory or executive board members in case of stock companies, alternatively executive directors for limited liability companies, on a sample of 37 German companies and their Czech subsidiaries. Germany is one of the most important investors in manufacturing industry in the Czech Republic, which makes this area extremely topical for our research. The paper explores current theoretical background of diversity topic, which is applied on the selected sample of multinational companies. The initial sample included 136 companies with German domicile traded on stock exchanges, with a market value of more than EUR 50 million. Chosen sample consists of 37 German companies with a subsidiary in the Czech Republic, for this sample we gained basic data describing the number of board members, their age, gender, nationality as well as recently published financial statements (ROA), complemented by number of employees. We use these indicators to evaluate the relation between various types of diversity and profitability in both a parent company and its subsidiary. Results point to specific practices of the German headquarters in appointment of Czech subsidiaries’ board members and executive directors and possible principles influencing a selection of individual members in terms of selected sorts of diversity. |