Research Question/Issue

The role of the board chair has become increasingly complex in recent decades. Research on corporate governance has called for and has initiated the pursuit of more research for the purpose of creating a better understanding of the role of board chairs. We reviewed 234 academic articles published in 66 journals, structured the existing research according to an Input‐Process‐Outcome‐Contexts framework, and provided a future research agenda for studies on the role of the board chair.

Research Findings/Insights

Our review reveals that the number of published studies on the position of the board chair has grown over the last two decades. Although extant research is dominated by quantitative studies exploring the impact of the board chair position on financial performance, frequently drawing on agency and stewardship theory, recent work has moved beyond this focus and has added valuable insights. The Input‐Process‐Outcome‐Contexts framework used to structure the extant research reveals that future research should pursue topics related to all components of the framework and that opportunities exist to draw from a broader set of theories.

Theoretical/Academic Implications

Based on the framework, we formulate seven specific research topics that can add valuable insights into the role of the board chair and suggest theories that can help inform research pursuing these topics. Taken together, these topics have the potential to create valuable insights into how board chairs are appointed, develop competencies, and interact and work with the CEO, the top management team, the board, and other stakeholders while acknowledging the influence of contextual factors, such as ownership, diversity, the firm's development stage, and external events and trends.

Practitioner/Policy Implications

Our review shows a growing global movement toward prescribing more corporate governance regulations and separating the positions of the board chair and the CEO. We show that many aspects need to be considered when choosing a governance configuration and when appointing a board chair because this role is becoming increasingly demanding.

Introductory paragraph: Hybrid organizations blend aspects of different organizational forms, identities, and institutional logics (Battilana & Lee, 2014; Jay, 2013; Pache & Santos, 2013). An ideal illustration of such organizations is social enterprises (hereafter, SE) that primarily aim at developing sustainable solutions to social problems while remaining significantly dependent on commercial revenue for their survival (Doherty, Haugh, & Lyon, 2014). These dual economic/social missions pose a host of challenges to SE governance. Studies suggest that governance in SEs often resembles a “grey zone” where boards involve heterogeneous configurations and practices that seek to minimize the risk of “mission drift” while achieving a balance between external and internal stakeholder demands (Cornforth, 2014; Ebrahim, Battilana,& Mair, 2014; Mair, Mayer, & Lutz, 2015; Mair, Wolf, & Ioan, 2020). Naturally, this requires SE boards to be configured with individuals who hold expertise both in the commercial sector and societal issues. In practice, such ideal configurations are unusual due to SEs’ inclination to pro bono practices and democratic principles that often outweigh the need for board expertise (Cornforth, 2004; Stone & Ostrower, 2007). As a result, SEs need to secure a balance between their dual missions and install an appropriate board that can take stock of the divergent stakeholder demands and design strategies ensuring accountability to the stakeholders. Needless to say, this underscores the importance of boards knowing how to prioritize multiple and often competing stakeholder demands and social issues—a call that has also been highlighted in many recent publications on corporate governance (Amis, Barney, Mahoney, & Wang, 2020; Bachmann, Gillespie, & Priem, 2015; Barney, 2018; Krause & Miller, 2020).