Take a Stand or Keep Your Seat: Board Turnover after Social Movement Boycotts
研究发现社会运动抵制会显著增加目标公司董事的离职率，且董事与挑战者的意识形态匹配会预测其离职行为，保守派比自由派更倾向于在面临对立挑战时固守职位。
While prior work has shown that a firm’s market performance affects the loyalty of its board, little is known about how corporate social responsibility affects directors’ willingness to serve. In this project, we shed light on this question by exploring how social movement boycotts that challenge a firm’s social responsibility affect board turnover. We find that boycotts provoke a significant increase in turnover at targeted firms, and that directors are especially likely to leave after boycotts that signal that the firm’s social values conflict with their personal values. Specifically, we find that an ideological match between a board member and the activist challengers predicts exit: liberals are more likely to leave after liberal challenges and conservatives are more likely to leave after conservative challenges. Moreover, we show that turnover is consistent with the rigidity of the right hypothesis in political psychology: conservatives, as compared to liberals, are more prone to entrenchment when their firms face challenges from the opposition. Our study offers strong evidence that corporate social performance matters to corporate directors, and provides insights into the manner in which contentious crises affect the motivation of corporate insiders.