Effects of Directors on the Escalation of Commitment

2019 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 17K13778
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Management
• Research Institution: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
• Principal Investigator: Watanabe Shu 東京外国語大学, 世界言語社会教育センター, 講師 (90754408)
• Project Period (FY): 2017-04-01 – 2020-03-31
• Keywords: 経営戦略 / 経営組織 / 撤退 / 意思決定 / コミットメント・エスカレーション / 経営者 / 経営陣

Outline of Final Research Achievements

In this research project, our contributions are following. Firstly, principal investigator gave a keynote speech at the Academic Association for Organizational Science annual meeting in 2018 to commemorate to win the Takamiya award (best paper award) to his paper that examine the relationship between outside directors and the escalation of commitment. Secondly, we compare the effect size of turnover of president, CEO, executive officer, and directors. Thirdly, we employ board quality researches and explore the effects of directors’ real independence and financial expertise, and consequently shows that outside directors who lack both qualities have negative effects. These findings are presented at 30th SASE (Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics) Annual Conference and published as peer-reviewed journal.

Free Research Field

経営学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

本研究の学術的意義は，主に次の2点にある．第1に，諸外国の既存研究では比較的明確に観察されていた経営者交代の影響が，日本ではそれほど明確ではない理由について，示唆を得たことである．具体的には，経営者として社長の影響を分析した場合，撤退の意思決定と明確な関係が観察されないのに対し，会長や常務会構成員では有意な影響が確認された．第2に，外部取締役の属性として，先行研究は，独立性の側面と専門知識の側面を別々に検討していたのに対し，本研究ではその両者を同時に検討した．これにより，両側面とも高いことが望ましい影響をもたらすという示唆を得た．