Ex-post governance in joint ventures: Determinants of monitoring by JV boards of directors

Considerable advances have been made in corporate governance research in recent years and opportunities exist to consider these developments
within alliances. We extend the “scope of operations” hypothesis to the domain of joint ventures. This proposition suggests
that the monitoring carried out by boards increases when organizations become more complex. The inherent characteristics of JVs
generate unique sources of complexity that are currently unexplored in the corporate governance literature. First, we seek to determine
their influence on monitoring by using primary data on JV board monitoring. Second, we adopt the size of JV boards as a proxy for
monitoring in order to examine whether the determinants of board size and monitoring in fact coincide and to reveal if certain effects are
masked by using board size as a simple proxy for monitoring. Doing so enables us to investigate the black-box of what boards actually do
as well as extend governance research to other organizational forms. Our findings confirm that the unique characteristics of JVs influence
the information needs by the boards resulting in more monitoring by JV directors. Our findings show there is value in bridging alliance
theory and the literature on corporate governance research. We also advance practitioner's understanding by providing suggestions on
how to structure JV boards in relation to their complexity.