| Board is considered by many scholars as one of the top priority of corporate governance, which is a truth universally acknowledged. Modern corporate governance requires set up a board which is efficient, highly supervisory and useful. Board play a role as a think tank in the company, providing strong support for major decision-making of directors, so the efficiency of the board of directors is higher, the decision-making accuracy is higher, also it helps executives make decision good for enterprise sustainable development. As the reform and development of listed companies in China, board of directors play a more and more important role, board governance issues has become a hot issue in today’s scholars study. Scholars at home and abroad explore the effects of board characteristics on corporate performance by means of theoretical and empirical research, but still haven’t reached unified conclusion. This paper argues that as different life cycle stage of the listed companies may appear a big gap in company scale and profit ability, which will lead to the role of the board of directors’characteristics on corporate performance is different. So this article use the symbols of three cash flows related to enterprise value creation:operating activities cash flow, investment activities cash flow and financing activities cash flow to mark out different enterprise life cycle. This paper has different growth stage studied respectively, to rich research achievements in the field, which will have certain theory value and practical significance.This paper mainly uses domestic and overseas relevant studies, research methods, research considerations, and research itself to verify the relationship between scale of the board of directors, leadership structure, proportion of independent directors, the shareholding ratio, frequency of board meetings and corporate performance, reveal problems existing in different enterprise’s board of directors, thus provides the basis for policy choosing in enterprises of different life cycle. This article mainly includes five chapters content. The first chapter is introduction, which mainly analysis the research background, significance, and the correlation literature review at home and abroad, also introduces the research purposes, methods, thought, the framework of the paper and the innovation points. The second chapter contains the introduction of related theory:concepts and partition for the enterprise life cycle stage, business performance and its measure forms, board characteristics. A theoretical analysis made to discover the relationship between Characteristics of the board of directors and the corporate performance of different stage, on the basis of which hypothesis is put forward. The third chapter introduces the data sources, sample selection, related variables, and build the model for empirical analysis. Through descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and regression analysis method, finally concludes that the relationship between board characteristics and corporate performance, to verify the hypothesis above. Chapter four of this paper is the research conclusion, provides the comments and suggestions for policy choosing in enterprises of different life cycle. The final part summarized, and pointed out the deficiencies in this paper and the future research directions in this field.This study takes the listed company in A share main board stock markets of Shanghai and Shenzhen from2010to2012as the lord sample, then use theoretical analysis and empirical research to find the relationship between corporate performance and board of directors of the listed company at the growth and maturation characteristics. The results show the difference between the two stage, which mainly manifested in the following aspects:(1) In the growing enterprise board size and corporate performance present positive correlation, though the mature enterprises board size has positive correlation with corporate performance as well, the relationship was not significant;(2) To enterprise in the growing stage, the joining together of chairman and CEO can promote corporate performance, while, to enterprise in the mature stage separation is more helpful;(3) The growing enterprise’s shareholding rate of board and corporate performance present positive correlation, while mature firms’are negative, and both are not significant;(4) the proportion of independent directors and corporate performance was significantly positive correlation in growing firm, and negative in mature company, but not significant;(5) the frequency of board meetings and corporate performance was significantly positive correlation in growing company, while negative in mature enterprises.On the basis of digesting and absorbing domestic and foreign relevant literature, this paper may appear the following three aspects of innovation points:(1) in this paper, the multiple indicator principal component analysis help form a comprehensive evaluation index to evaluate business performance of listed companies in China, avoiding personal subjective evaluation, which is easy to achieve a relatively complete and accuracy requirements;(2) life cycle theory are introduced in this paper, considering the characteristics of different life cycle stage enterprises, have theoretical analysis on the relationship between the enterprise’s board of directors characteristics and corporate performance;(3) the samples are grouping according to enterprise’s stage life cycle, descriptive statistics, correlation analysis and regression analysis show the relationship between the enterprise’s board of directors characteristics and corporate performance in different life cycle stage, and then conclude that the enterprise in different life cycle phase should choose and implement different board policy. |
