Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Sievers, Burkard
• Long, Susan

Titel

Roles, risks and complexity: An exploration of the triangle institutional investors, executive boards and supervisory boards in the Netherlands

Ist Teil von

• Towards a Socioanalysis of Money, Finance and Capitalism, 2012, p.200-213

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Introduction The recent crisis in fin an cial markets has triggered questions about the actual and perceived role of shareholders. In pub lic debate, they have been criticized for a one-sided fin an cial, overly risky and short-term orientation. In this con text, Eumedion, an inter est group representing institutional investors in the Neth erlands and Europe in par ticu lar, has initiated an inde pend ent qualit at ive survey.1 It asked for an ex plora tion of the roles defined in the law and rel ev ant Dutch corporate governance codes for the management and super visory boards of listed com panies and shareholders on the one hand, and the perceived roles of these parti cip ants on the other. From April to Octo ber 2009 we or gan ized in-depth inter views and round-table discussions with representatives of management boards (current and former CEOs), super visory boards, the Dutch central bank, regu latory authorities of Dutch fin an cial markets, private and institutional inves­ tors, and experts or scholars on corporate governance, com pany law and invest­ ment and asset management. The survey and the report (Kemna and Van de Loo 2009) are the result of an interdisciplinary approach ex plor ing aspects of the ex peri ence, perception and beha vi our of the various parti cip ants in their respec­ tive roles in the con text of the Dutch fin an cial sys tem. As such, it is the fruit of an interdisciplinary approach combining insights, per spect ives and frameworks from the domains of corporate governance, fin an cial markets and asset manage­ ment with those from leadership, group and sys tems psychody namics (Gould et al. 2001). In this chapter we will focus on changes in the perceptions, ex periences and beha vi ours of key players in their roles as member of the managing board, super visory dir ector or investor, as the case may be. We will ex plore how these key players ex peri ence and understand their own as well as the cor responding roles of other key players. Organizational role ana lysis (Borwick 2006) has been a leading framework in the conduction and ana lysis of the inter views. Organizational role ana lysis differentiates between the defined role (the formal definition and charac ter istics of the role), the de scribed role (the actual ex peri­ ence and beha vi our of the person in the role) and the sys temic role (how the role fits the sys tem and makes the sys tem work). Individual ex peri ences and beha vi- ours of indi viduals in their roles typ ic ally reflect signi fic ant charac ter istics of the sys tem or organ iza tion. After the pre senta tion of the various roles and their inter­ relatedness, we will frame the sys tems complexity in terms of multiparty and interorgan iza tional collaboration (Prins 2006, 2010; Neumann 2010). The enorm ous complexity of the fin an cial sys tem makes it also increasingly volatile and unpre dict able. The risks seem insufficiently contained, as the recent series of fin an cial crises reveal. A ser ious question is how to address these risks related to the pri mary task in a constructive way instead of avoiding them by unconscious col lect ive defensive routines (Miller 1993; Hirschhorn 1999). We will conclude this chapter with a few re com mendations about how even a small and rel at ively simple set of beha vi oural steps might improve the relationships among this trian­ gle of institutional investors, members of the management board and super visory directors.