Boards of directors and environmental sustainability: Finding the synergies that yield results

Abstract

Abstract Boards of directors play an important role in one of the biggest challenges facing companies today: environmental sustainability. While research has mainly focused on the individual and isolated impacts of board composition characteristics on environmental sustainability, we aim to provide an understanding of what combinations of these characteristics result in its high/low levels and why. Using a fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis of a Spanish company's sample over the period 2014–2019, we find that the characteristics of board composition could be complemented or substituted among them, having a similar impact on environmental sustainability performance. We also find that large boards, with a high presence of women and a low presence of family members, led to high environmental sustainability while having no dedicated sustainability committee and a lack of independence with no family presence yielded a low one. Finally, we draw four strategies for the design of the board composition.