Corporate Governance - Parties To Corporate Governance

Parties To Corporate Governance

The most influential parties involved in corporate governance include government agencies and authorities, stock exchanges, management (including the board of directors and its chair, the Chief Executive Officer or the equivalent, other executives and line management, shareholders and auditors). Other influential stakeholders may include lenders, suppliers, employees, creditors, customers and the community at large.

The agency view of the corporation posits that the shareholder forgoes decision rights (control) and entrusts the manager to act in the shareholders' best (joint) interests. Partly as a result of this separation between the two investors and managers, corporate governance mechanisms include a system of controls intended to help align managers' incentives with those of shareholders. Agency concerns (risk) are necessarily lower for a controlling shareholder.

A board of directors is expected to play a key role in corporate governance. The board has the responsibility of endorsing the organization's strategy, developing directional policy, appointing, supervising and remunerating senior executives, and ensuring accountability of the organization to its investors and authorities.

All parties to corporate governance have an interest, whether direct or indirect, in the financial performance of the corporation. Directors, workers and management receive salaries, benefits and reputation, while investors expect to receive financial returns. For lenders, it is specified interest payments, while returns to equity investors arise from dividend distributions or capital gains on their stock. Customers are concerned with the certainty of the provision of goods and services of an appropriate quality; suppliers are concerned with compensation for their goods or services, and possible continued trading relationships. These parties provide value to the corporation in the form of financial, physical, human and other forms of capital. Many parties may also be concerned with corporate social performance.

A key factor in a party's decision to participate in or engage with a corporation is their confidence that the corporation will deliver the party's expected outcomes. When categories of parties (stakeholders) do not have sufficient confidence that a corporation is being controlled and directed in a manner consistent with their desired outcomes, they are less likely to engage with the corporation. When this becomes an endemic system feature, the loss of confidence and participation in markets may affect many other stakeholders, and increases the likelihood of political action. There is substantial interest in how external systems and institutions, including markets, influence corporate governance.

Read more about this topic:  Corporate Governance

Famous quotes containing the words parties, corporate and/or governance:

    All parties attempt to represent important things that have developed outside themselves as unimportant, and where they fail in this they assail those things all the more bitterly the more admirable they are.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

    “It’s hard enough to adjust [to the lack of control] in the beginning,” says a corporate vice president and single mother. “But then you realize that everything keeps changing, so you never regain control. I was just learning to take care of the belly-button stump, when it fell off. I had just learned to make formula really efficiently, when Sarah stopped using it.”
    Anne C. Weisberg (20th century)

    He yaf me al the bridel in myn hand,
    To han the governance of hous and land,
    And of his tonge and his hand also;
    Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)