Board Attributes and the Impact of Organizational Characteristics: Findings from the Greek Listed Manufacturing Companies

Corporate governance has emerged in the last decade mainly due to a number of corporate failures and scandals that have drawn the global attention. Furthermore, the current financial crisis has highlighted issues of CG in a widest sense and the corporate governance codes and recommendations are being revisited, in order to facilitate transparency and accountability of the management processes within organisations. A range of studies has investigated the essential features of CG; most of the discussion on CG has been driven by concerns with the effectiveness of board of directors that is expected to represent the interests of the shareholders by controlling the opportunistic behaviour of managers and by providing resources to the firm. In Greece, CG is a topic of increasing interest, as a result of dysfunctional boards, executive misconduct and international pressures for a more shareholder-oriented model of governance. However, due to the fact that Greece is a small economy with the majority of companies being small to medium, the interest of corporate governance is highly concentrated to the listed companies of the Athens Stock Exchange (ATHEX). In this study, the focus is on the manufacturing companies of the ATHEX, with about half of the total listed companies being characterized as such.