Externa styrelseledamöters samband med lönsamhet i onoterade mindre tillverkningsföretag : En kvantitativ studie utifrån resursberoendeteorin

Sammanfattning

As smaller unlisted firms grow beyond their founders' initial capacity, the need for external expertise and networks increases. This study examines how the structural presence of external board members is associated with profitability in Swedish unlisted manufacturing firms with 20–50 employees. Drawing on resource dependence theory and the concept of board capital, a deductive quantitative approach is applied using register data from 359 firms in the Halland and Västra Götaland regions. The structural presence of external board members is operationalized as a dummy variable and tested against three profitability measures through multiple OLS regression analyses. The results show no statistically significant relationship between the structural presence of external board members and firm profitability. All three hypotheses are rejected despite consistently positive coefficients, while leverage emerges as the only robustly significant determinant of profitability across all models. The conclusion is that structural presence alone is an insufficient measure for capturing the resource-based mechanisms that resource dependence theory predicts. For the theory's expected effects to become empirically observable, future research needs measurement instruments with higher resolution than register-based dummy variables can provide.