Boardroom Operational and Financial Control: an Insider View

What is it about?

This study examines the control processes and their dynamics at the board level of two non-profit organizations with a view to penetrating and exploring directors’ control orientations, discourse and decisions in their holistic context. In comparison with the predominantly survey- and interview-based prior research on board-level control, this study offers a distinctly processual view through its employment of a longitudinal complete member researcher participant observer methodology. Three primary themes of boardroom control focus are identified and analysed. These are control reporting, director’s control orientation and the board’s budgetary control approach. Directors’ strategic orientation is found to be the primary driver of their exercise of control, with reporting systems and routine monitoring emerging as adjuncts to their primary strategic control focus. Strategy-triggered control activity exhibits itself largely via directors’ cost–benefit and risk management analyses communally developed in the course of board meeting exchanges.

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