Abstract
Understanding the cultural dynamics of boards is critical to understanding why crises emerge and how to make boards more effective at preventing them. Board culture, like any culture, is based on the beliefs and values that board members hold in common and manifests itself in how board members behave towards each other, how they communicate with each other and, perhaps most importantly, how they make decisions. This chapter identifies six different types of board dysfunction—lack of independence from management, missing key voices, cultural amplification, diffusion of responsibility, rule-bound cultures and groupthink—but also clearly identifies how each of these in turn manifests in a particular type of dysfunction in boardroom behaviours over and over again in the present (and also in the past).
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Notes
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Brown, G., Peterson, R.S. (2022). Causes of Dysfunctional Culture. In: Disaster in the Boardroom. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91658-9_4
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