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korean management review - Vol. 51 , No. 4

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korean management review - Vol. 51, No. 4, pp. 869-893
Abbreviation: kmr
ISSN: 1226-1874 (Print)
Print publication date 31 Aug 2022
Received 03 May 2021 Revised 13 Mar 2022 Accepted 04 Apr 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17287/kmr.2022.51.4.869
Sustainability Management and Diversity: An Institutional Analysis of Female Board Membership
Doyoon Kim ; Jeeyeon Lee ; Dongyoub Shin
(First Author/Corresponding Author) Yonsei Business Research Institute, Research Fellow (doyoon.kim@yonsei.ac.kr)
(Co-Author) Ernst & Young, Consultant (christina.jeeyeon@gmail.com)
(Co-Author) Yonsei University, School of Business, Professor (dshin@yonsei.ac.kr)
지속가능경영과 다양성: 제도주의이론 관점에서 본 이사회 내 여성 임원 비율

Copyright 2011 THE KOREAN ACADEMIC SOCIETY OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of corporate behaviors related to sustainable management which are presumably intended to attain institutional legitimacy on the diversity of board of directors in terms of the proportion of female executives in board composition. While previous studies focused mainly on roles of female board members in the advancement of corporate social responsibility or accounting transparency, we pay attention to the institutional factors that may affect female executives’ participation in the board of directors. The results of our empirical analysis of leading Korean corporations in terms of market capitalization from 2014 to 2018 show that corporate characteristics and behaviors related to sustainability and institutional dynamics, such as publishing sustainability report, sensitivity of environmental issues, and visibility within institutional fields, have positive effects on the participation of female executives in the board of directors, as predicted in our hypotheses.


Keywords: Female Executives, Corporate Sustainable Management, Institutional Theory, Corporate Social Responsibility, Environmental Sensitivity, Corporate Visibility

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∙ The author Doyoon Kim is a research fellow at the Yonsei Business Research Institute, Seoul, Korea. He received his Ph.D. from Yonsei University. His past works were published in academic journals from diverse backgrounds including Korean management Review, Journal of Strategic Management, Knowledge Management Research. He teaches organization theory, strategic management, and venture creation and management through Korea University, Yonsei University, and Hanyang University Business School. His research interests include organization theory, organizational learning, technology management, startup and entrepreneurship.

∙ The author Jeeyeon Lee graduated from Yonsei University with a degree in social welfare and a master's degree in business administration. She conducted a sustainable management study to add depth to the interest in corporate social contribution as an extension of her founding a social venture. Related papers were published in Korean Journal of Management, Korean Management Review, and Journal of Social Value and Enterprise. Currently, she is working on ESG and digital projects at Ernst & Young consulting firm.

∙ The author Dongyoub Shin is a professor of organization theory at the School of Business, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University. His past works were published in academic journals from diverse backgrounds including Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, and Poetics. His research interests include organizational politics and institutional change, relational sources of organizational dysfunctions, sources and consequences of decoupling, coevolution between technological systems and institutional systems, organizational changes in the currently ongoing paradigm shift, and organizational analysis of cultural industries.