To examine board members’ influence in strategic decision-making, we consider the role of emotion displays during board meetings. We build a grounded model of how board members influence strategic decisions, which can occur directly from one director to a top manager or indirectly from one board member through the rest of the board. Drawing from the literature on nonverbal communication, we theorize that displays of anger and happiness by board members increase their focused or diffuse influence, respectively, over strategic decisions proposed by top management. We further hypothesize that the duration of the discussion moderates these main effects. Analyses on 366 agenda items from 68 board meetings of four Dutch water management organizations support our predictions that board member emotional displays indeed impact strategic decision outcomes via focused and diffuse influence processes. Our results also suggest that the duration of an agenda item’s discussion attenuates the association between board members’ displayed anger and their focused influence. These findings offer insights and new avenues for research in corporate governance, emotions, and communications, and have implications for our scholarly and practical understanding of how board members influence strategic decisions.

中文翻译：

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不仅仅是一种感觉：董事会成员表现出的愤怒和快乐如何影响战略决策

为了考察董事会成员在战略决策中的影响力，我们考虑了董事会会议期间情绪表达的作用。我们建立了一个关于董事会成员如何影响战略决策的基础模型，该模型可以直接从一名董事到高层管理人员，也可以从一名董事会成员通过董事会其他成员间接发生。根据非语言沟通的文献，我们推测，董事会成员表现出的愤怒和快乐分别会增加他们对高层管理人员提出的战略决策的集中或分散影响。我们进一步假设讨论的持续时间会缓和这些主要影响。对荷兰四个水管理组织 68 次董事会会议的 366 个议程项目的分析支持了我们的预测，即董事会成员的情绪表现确实通过集中和分散的影响过程影响战略决策结果。我们的结果还表明，议程项目讨论的持续时间削弱了董事会成员表现出的愤怒与其集中影响力之间的关联。这些发现为公司治理、情感和沟通方面的研究提供了见解和新途径，并对我们对董事会成员如何影响战略决策的学术和实践理解产生影响。