Abstract/Summary

Board directors’ perceptions of sustainability are critical to their behaviours and contributions to board-level consensus decision-making that affect businesses’ accountability and strategic priority. Directors interact with each other and proactively sense social expectations on the subject for their priority judgements, balancing contradictory interests and pressures from different stakeholders. However, boards, organisations, and stakeholders’ perspectives are contextual. This thesis presents insights from 26 one-to-one in-depth interviews with board directors (including 14 US directors and 12 directors from other countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Germany, and India). This study develops a stewardship sustainability framework illustrating six interrelated characteristics of sustainability perceptions, concluding four reputation risk concerns that motivate directors’ proactive involvement in sustainability. The novel framework shares eight propositions for governance mechanisms optimization to accelerate the establishment of a shared understanding of sustainability across directors and people around the board. This study significantly contributes knowledge in corporate governance and sustainability literature by developing a stewardship sustainability framework and providing empirical evidence of six characteristics of directors’ perceptions of sustainability. The propositions theoretically advance stewardship theory by suggesting directors’ proactive influence on board-level sustainability perception as motivations for stewardship decision-making. The novel framework provides conceptual guidance to board directors, policymakers, and board-level performance assessors. The study contributes to thematic analysis by demonstrating knowledge formation from collective insider views of elites from business and key stakeholders, following a three-layer systematic process. Moreover, with the gap of qualitative corporate governance studies in the US context, this study contributes in this regard.