Board characteristics and firm performance: Case of Saudi Arabia

Corporate governance (CG) has been a topic of hot discussion not only in business world but also in academic world. This is all due to its complex and scandalous nature. Therefore it is always important to shed some light academically and perform analysis and autopsy on corporate governance failures such as Commerce Bank (1991) Enron (2001), Adelphia (2002), and World Com (2002). This study investigates the relationship between the board characteristics (board size, board composition, board meeting, board interlock, CEO age and CEO family) and firm performance (ROA) based on the annual reports of 102 companies listed on the
Saudi Market starting from 2010 to 2012. The sample of non-financial firms was collected from Saudi Market (Tadawul) as well as from the director's profile in the annual reports.
The results of this study find that board meeting, board interlock and CEO age have no effect on firm performance in the selected sample while board size has strong positive relationship with firm performance (ROA). In addition, it is also noteworthy to note that the relationship between board composition and CEO family is significant negatively. It is recommended that future research take into consideration the investigation of relationship between corporate governance before issuing the
Code of Corporate Governance in Saudi Arabia and after issuing them in order to investigate the differences during longer period