The Effect of Board Leadership Roles and Committee Responsibilities on Governance Effectiveness

Abstract Expectations for corporate directors have expanded over time, placing growing demands on their time and attention. Drawing on the cognitive foundations of the attention‐based view (ABV), we theorize that board directors' leadership roles and committee assignments shape their attentional perspective and engagement in ways that can both hinder and enhance governance effectiveness. Using a panel dataset of 39,610 board‐committee‐year observations from over 3000 US boards between 1999 and 2023, we examine how directors' roles and responsibilities relate to governance outcomes associated with boards' audit, compensation, and nomination committees. We find that holding more board‐leadership roles and board‐committee assignments may impose cognitive burdens that undermine governance effectiveness, whereas holding more‐diversified committee assignments may enhance governance by enabling directors to sequence their attention more strategically across governance tasks. This examination thus advances our theoretical understanding of how attention functions when distributed across multiple organizations simultaneously. In addition, by moving beyond simple counts of board directorships to explicitly consider the number and configuration of directors' leadership roles and committee responsibilities, this study advances the literature on governance effectiveness and board design. In doing so, we highlight the value of committee‐level analysis for understanding board dynamics and governance.