Ruth V. Aguilera is Distinguished Professor of International Business and Strategy at Northeastern University and Visiting Professor at ESADE Business School; William Q. Judge is E.V. Williams Chair of Strategic Leadership & Professor of Strategic Management at Old Dominion University; and Siri Terjesen is Dean’s Faculty Fellow in Entrepreneurship and Director of the AU Center for Innovation at American University and Adjunct Professor at Norwegian School of Economics. This post is based on their recent article, forthcoming in Academy of Management Review.
Societies throughout the world utilize a wide range of corporate governance mechanisms to govern their corporations. Normally, most societies use rules and norms to get corporations to conform to traditional corporate governance practices; and most corporations do conform to this national governance logic. However, some corporations do not conform to the logic in which they are embedded. When this deviation happens, we note that corporate governance deviance has occurred. The purpose of our article was to explain what corporate governance deviance is, and why, when, and how firms engage in governance deviance.