Do Board Topics Change As the Board Nears the End of Their Term?

Although boards are an important echelon of the organization, research is increasingly questioning what their roles are. In this paper, we develop a temporal perspective that shows that boards focus on different topics depending on the time until their term ends. We argue that boards will behave more opportunistically as their end term draws near. Specifically, boards will discuss fewer long-term topics, but based on a renomination incentive, will simultaneously discuss more stakeholder-related topics. We test our predictions in the Dutch water management context, where board members’ collective end term is predefined, and the nature of opportunistic behavior is complex as board members are elected and nominated by stakeholder groups. Indeed, we find that boards discuss fewer long-term topics and more stakeholder-related topics as their end term becomes imminent. This has important implications for the literature on corporate governance and decision making as we show that opportunistic behavior can materialize in different forms concurrently.