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ABSTRACT
Previous research has shown that firms’ resources and management capabilities can contribute significantly to differences in firm resilience. However, little is known about the effect of board governance structures on tourism enterprise resilience during industry crises. This study is the first to explore the effects of board governance structure on tourism firms’ resilience in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, this study constructed an econometric model, applying ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares with instrumental variables. The model was empirically tested using data from listed Chinese tourism companies for 14 months before and after the COVID-19 outbreak. The study's findings show that board structure significantly impacts tourism enterprises’ risk resilience. The role of the board governance structure is significantly heterogeneous owing to differences in the proportion of independent directors, the shareholding ratio of directors and the dual role levels of the chairman and general manager of tourism firms. This study extends the growing tourism resilience literature by adding the important variable of board governance structure. The contribution of this study lies in providing strategic suggestions for tourism firms to enhance their resilience by adjusting their board governance structure, thereby increasing their ability to weather unexpected crisis events.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The chapter of ‘Corporate governance: the board of directors and standing committees’ in the Study Guide of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants defines the structure and role of Audit Committee.
2 These companies were excluded for two reasons: 1) Given the intense speculative activity in IPOs, price changes in IPOs have little to do with the company's own resilience. 2) Given the short-listing period, no data can be used to compare previous periods in the analysis.