Should the Cooperation between Board Members be improved?

An area of improvement based on the pilot research study conducted by Denison Consulting on „The Role of Corporate Culture on Supervisory Boards“ in Switzerland is in the area of cooperation amongst Board Members.

On the question „Cooperation between different members of the Board is actively encouraged“ the majority of respondents gave a lower score than in other areas. Compared to the global Denison benchmark, Board Members consider that 26% of other companies perform better when it comes to cooperation amongst Board Members. Overall, this item was one of the five lowest scoring items in the survey of in total 34 questions.

This was primarily a result of low scores by Board Members serving on companies with 50-200 and 201-1.000 employees. In bigger companies on the contrary (5.001-10.000 employees) there was a 100% favourable score with a mean score of 4.0 on a 5 point scale.

Looking at the same item by industry sector, with the exception of the Financial Services Industry all other industries represented in the survey results (Consumer Goods, Energy, Information / IT, Health Care and „Others“), scored the cooperation amongst Board members as one of the lowest five items.

While there was no significant difference between listed and non-listed companies, Members of Supervisory Boards clearly saw a bigger need for improvements than Presidents of Boards.

If you are interested in the full details of the study, please contact afiedler@denisoncultureeurope.com

We would like to thank all participants for their contribution.