Behavioural Risks in Corporate Governance: Regulatory Intervention as a Risk Management Mechanism

The recent cases involving the fixing of LIBOR rates and money laundering issues in the banking industry have highlighted once again the need to focus on the behaviour of company directors, as their behaviour has the potential to affect governance outcomes and impact on the success or failure of companies. This book examines how personality and behavioural issues have contributed to major corporate failures. Examples from the UK, the US and Australia are analysed in order to illustrate the impact of inappropriate behaviour on the part of company directors in corporate governance.

The book argues that current corporate governance mechanisms lack any provisions for identifying and managing personality risks in relation to company directors and that this represents a gap which needs to be bridged to prevent potential corporate failures. The book draws on research in the fields of psychology and the behavioural sciences looking at the relationship between personality traits and job performance. It then goes on to use this to present a conceptual framework for identifying and managing personality risks and explores how this may be built into corporate governance regulation.