An Empirical Study On The Impact Of The Characteristics Of Chinese Listed Companies' Board Of Directors On Corporate Competitiveness

With the development of economy and the accelerating process of globalization, the structure is developing. The enterprises have developed rapidly, especially when the corporate ownership is separate form managerial authority, which lead to the issue of corporate governance is increasingly prominent. The Scholars pay more attention to the corporate competitiveness. As an endogenous corporate variable, the central institution of internal governance is changing from"Shareholders Meeting"to"Board of Directors". And the optimization of corporate governance can ensure and enhance the corporate competitiveness. As the core mechanism of internal governance, the good board of directors is vital to maintain and develop corporate competitiveness.Meanwhile, our listed companies have made great development after we implement the reform and opening-up policy and enter the WTO. But compared with foreign capital markets, the study of Board of director's institution is in investigation and research stage. Due to Board of director's institution is introduced from abroad and our special governance environment,"to draw as many useful lessons from as many countries as possible"has also a series of problem, like the unreasonable board structure, less board independent,"Black Case Work"and low effectiveness. So it's essential to study the impact on the corporate competitiveness from the perspective of the board features. The board of directors' optimization not only can play the important role in the function of management guidance, supervision and decision-making but also ensure the leadership continuity, transmit the strong competitive advantage signal of corporate and prevent"internal control"and"one man"situation. First, this article collects and arranges literature of board of directors'characteristic and corporate competitiveness, I find that scholars pay rarely attention to the relations with corporate competitiveness from the perspective of characteristics and almost take enterprise performance represent corporate competitiveness. This article overviews and classifies competitive evaluation system and describes the definition of corporate competitiveness. And profitability indicator shows the most basic level of corporate competitiveness index to reflect the results of competitive advantage. And the paper selects the corporate competitiveness 4 dimensions: operating ability, growth ability, management efficiency and development ability. The paper selects five dimensions in Characteristics of the board of directors: board size, two-level setting mode, board independence, board intensity characteristics and personal characteristics. Then find different conclusion about the characteristics of board's effects.Second, this paper selects the retail industry in listed companies, based on mainly the 2008 financial reporting data. After this, five hypotheses are presented. H1: board size is relevant to corporate competitiveness; H2: the separation between chairman and CEO is related to corporate competitiveness; H3: the proportion of independent directors is positively related to corporate competitiveness; H4: board meetings is positively related to corporate competitiveness; H5: the average age of the board is negatively related to corporate competitiveness. By utilizing the spss17.0, the paper analyses the collected data through descriptive statistical analysis and multiple regression analysis. The paper comes to its conclusion: (1) board size is not the influence factor of corporate competitiveness. The size of the board is just arranged in accordance with company law, but not its need. The treatment loss exceeds the benefits when the board size is larger than the best one. And the screw-up management appears, like"Free rider problem". (2) Two-level setting mode is also not the influence factor of corporate competitiveness. Although the situation of"big one"is changed, it's useless. (3) Independent director system has been established in China and most of the companies in accordance with the requirements of SFC which set up at least 1/3 independent directors, the role of independent directors play no significant. Independent director is not related to corporate competitiveness. (4) In the competitive environment, the Increase of the number time of board meetings can be beneficial to the communication between board members, and board of directors adjust enterprise decision-making and strategy according to changes in the environment. This is good for enhancing corporate competitiveness. Board meetings is positively related to corporate competitiveness (5) The young board of Directors will seize the opportunity by using corporate advantage and have enough energy and time to handle company in the highly competitive market environment with great changes. The average age of board is negatively related to corporate competitiveness.Final, we find only board intensity characteristics and personal characteristics are through the assumption. It's different with previous conclusions. This also explains board of directors'institution is not perfect in China, and its function is not effective through the above empirical results. Of course, this paper still has certain limitations: it only analyses the retail industry. Data sample is limited. And data analysis is the multiple linear regressions but not take into account the situation of non-linear. To some extent, this weakens the persuasiveness of empirical analysis. This paper not only considers the most basic indicators of operations, but also the other indicators management efficiency, growth ability, and development ability. And it plays the certain important role to the relative research on the use of non-accounting indicators (the age of board).