IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-25051-2_10.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Chairman of the Board of Directors: Role and Contribution

In: Global Boards

Author

Listed:
  • Eleanor O’Higgins

    (University College Dublin
    London School of Economics and Political Science)

Abstract

From the early 1990s, there has been a growing awareness of the relevance of positive leadership in corporate governance for the sustainability of companies and the business system. This awareness stems from manifest failures in corporate governance, which gave rise to scandals worldwide, and arguably, to the global banking crisis of 2008. An early scandal, which was a factor initiating corporate governance reform in the UK, was the 1991 Maxwell downfall, when it was revealed that Robert Maxwell, Chairman and CEO of Maxwell Communications Corporation, had caused a GBP 441 million-sized hole in the company pension fund to cover hidden personal debts of GBP 4 billion. Subsequent analysis highlighted a number of corporate governance deficiencies and lack of accountability and controls because of the concentration of power that had facilitated Maxwell’s fraudulent activities.

Suggested Citation

  • Eleanor O’Higgins, 2009. "The Chairman of the Board of Directors: Role and Contribution," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Andrew Kakabadse & Nada Kakabadse (ed.), Global Boards, chapter 9, pages 217-235, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-25051-2_10
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230250512_10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-25051-2_10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.