More than a Feeling: How Board Member Displays of Anger and Happiness Influence Strategic Decisions

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.