710: Testing Causal Mechanisms of the Decision-Making Process in Corporate Governance (16604)

In pursuit of strong theoretical contributions and theoretical advancements in the management field, scholars have emphasized the need for methodological rigor and the importance of robustly testing the claimed theoretical mechanisms. While experiments remain the “golden standard” of establishing causality and testing theorized mechanisms, they might not be feasible or easily implementable in many macro fields, including the field of corporate governance and strategic leadership, where access to corporate leaders to conduct experiments is limited. Scholars in corporate governance who rely heavily on archival data need different tools to overcome the challenges associated with rigorously testing their theories. The purpose of this PDW is to equip participants with some vanguard tools to enhance their methodological rigor in testing the theoretical mechanisms in corporate governance by engaging a group of expert panelists in a moderated and interactive discussion. During this PDW, six panelists will share their thoughts on (1) how to navigate matching the methodology with the mechanisms they theorize about, (2) which steps to follow when designing a study (having in mind the review process), and (3) what are the major opportunity and challenge of using a specific method in the corporate governance and strategic leadership field. The topics covered include the use of videometrics in corporate governance, publishing with novel archival data, dealing with endogeneity, the use of robustness tests and supplemental analysis to substantiate the testing of theoretical mechanisms, gathering and analyzing primary data in corporate governance, and the use of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA).