From Seats at the Table to Voices in the Discussion: Antecedents of Underrepresented Director Participation in Board Meetings

A corporate board’s work is largely dependent on the collective contributions of individual directors. Thus, greater board diversity, with its commensurate knowledge complementarity, should stimulate better board discussions when members actively participate. Without the participation of underrepresented directors, however, the potential benefits of board diversity are lost. Herein we examine the drivers of underrepresented directors’ participation in board meetings. Departing from prior studies that often used a single-level, compositional view of board diversity, we explore the antecedents of individual underrepresented director participation with a multi-level, multi-theoretic model. We find strong empirical support for our model, derived from detailed board of director meeting transcripts, offering several theoretical contributions to the literature.