• board of directors
• ceo
• ceo humility
• ceo narcissism
• environmental innovation
• environmental performance
• environmental sustainability
• gender diversity

The urgency of climate issues is now widely recognized globally, with major international organizations emphasizing the importance of concrete and immediate action. The United Nations (UN), through the 2015 Paris Agreement, called on countries to limit the global temperature increase to well below 2 °C, ideally 1.5 °C, compared to pre-industrial levels (UN, 2015). This agreement marked a turning point in the global approach to climate change, pushing nations to set ambitious targets toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Following this, the signing of the Global Biodiversity Framework at COP15 in Montreal in 2022 further emphasized the urgency of preserving global biodiversity to mitigate the effects of climate change (UN, 2022). The World Economic Forum (WEF) has also recognized the urgency of climate issues as a major global threat for several years, reinforcing this message in the Global Risks Report published in 2020. In that report, the WEF highlighted that, for the first time in history, environmental risks, including extreme weather events, failure of climate action, and loss of biodiversity, occupied the top five places in the ranking of global risks in terms of likelihood and impact (WEF, 2020). This underscores that climate change is no longer just an environmental issue but a central concern for global economic and social stability. The WEF reiterated the urgency of climate issues in its Global Risks Report 2023, in which it placed climate change risks, including extreme events and biodiversity loss, among the main threats to global stability. The WEF emphasizes that, despite efforts, the world is lagging behind its climate targets and that the window to keep global warming below 2 °C, as stipulated in the Paris Agreement, is rapidly closing (WEF, 2023). This call highlights how climate change is not only an environmental issue but also an economic and social one, with impacts that threaten the foundations of global prosperity. The WEF has called on business leaders and boards to integrate sustainable strategies and climate resilience into their action plans, stating that sustainability is now both an ethical and economic imperative. The WEF also promotes initiatives to engage the private sector in achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN 2030 Agenda, arguing that businesses and their board of directors (BoDs) should play key roles in driving the transition to a low-carbon economy (WEF, 2020). Consequently, corporate boards are increasingly expected to play strategic roles in shaping sustainability initiatives that integrate environmental concerns into core business operations. In this context, the influence of board members, diversity of board composition, and interplay of executives’ personality traits, particularly those of chief executive officers (CEOs), have become essential factors in determining a company’s environmental performance. While these aspects are broadly relevant, each has research gaps that this thesis seeks to address. Although significant efforts have been made in research on corporate governance and environmental challenges, several gaps remain (Enciso-Alfaro and García-Sánchez, 2023).
This thesis aims to answer some of the remaining unexplored questions, specifically:
1) What is the current state of the literature on board of directors and corporate environmental sustainability?
2) Does the presence of women on a board influence environmental innovation and, consequently, the company’s financial performance through board diversity practices and policies?
3) Can the seemingly opposing characteristics of narcissism and humility, when combined, lead a company to achieve high levels of environmental performance?
The central aim of this thesis is to explore emerging research themes regarding the role of the board of directors in managing corporate environmental sustainability. After mapping the research on the topic, this thesis highlights how the presence of women on boards can promote the development of environmental innovations and how these factors can affect a company’s financial performance. The valorization of environmental issues, beyond its implications for sustainability, has been argued to have positive effects on a company’s performance. Finally, after discussing the structure and composition of the board of directors, this thesis focuses on a pivotal figure within the board—the CEO. It explores how two psychological traits of the CEO can influence relationships with top management and how these dynamics affect environmental performance. The first study in this thesis presents a bibliometric analysis of research linking BoDs and environmental sustainability, emphasizing the central role of BoDs in promoting environmental governance. This bibliometric study was conducted by searching two main databases, namely, Scopus and Web of Science, focusing on the literature from the last 10 years. This period was selected because it marked a significant increase in contributions and interest due to the introduction of the UN Global Compact Guidelines (Connor, 2015) and the Sustainable Development Goals (Weiland et al., 2021). Articles were selected following the PRISMA protocol (Moher et al., 2009), resulting in 135 studies that were analyzed using VOSviewer 1.6.16 for VOS analysis. This analysis applied bibliographic matching as an aggregation criterion (Van Eck & Waltman, 2010), allowing the corpus to be analyzed by trends per year, most relevant authors, most cited papers, and most identified keywords. Furthermore, through this bibliometric analysis, three distinct research clusters were identified and individually analyzed, revealing three research streams, namely, the influence of board composition on environmental performance, governance mechanisms that enhance environmental transparency, and the role of gender diversity in promoting companies’ environmental impacts. This study provides a map of the evolution of research in this field, highlighting research gaps and opportunities for future investigations into the strategic functions of boards. This foundation sets the stage for the second and third chapters that focus on research topics yet to be explored, specifically the presence of women on boards in relation to environmental innovation and financial performance, using diversity practices and policies as a mediating variable and the interplay between CEOs’ personality traits and how they influence top management in promoting corporate environmental performance. The second chapter explores the relationship between gender diversity in board composition, environmental innovation, and financial performance, emphasizing the mediating role of diversity policies and practices. Based on gender socialization theory (Mason and Mudrack, 1996) and the behavioral theory of the firm (Miller and del Carmen Triana, 2009), this study demonstrates that the effectiveness of gender diversity transcends the mere presence of women on boards. It highlights the importance of structured diversity policies and inclusive practices in fostering an enabling environment within the board (Buse et al., 2016). To achieve this, structural equation modeling was used to analyze data from 200 UK board members. The research revealed that gender-diverse boards, when supported by formalized diversity initiatives, could significantly improve both financial performance and environmental innovation. This link is further strengthened by positive correlations between environmental innovation and financial performance, suggesting that diversity-driven environmental initiatives contribute to broader corporate success. This study underscores the conditions under which gender diversity impacts corporate performance, offering insights for board governance aimed at fostering environmentally and financially beneficial innovation. The third chapter focuses on the CEO as an individual figure within the board of directors. This study examines how CEO personality traits, particularly the paradoxical combination of narcissism and humility, affect the environmental performance of European manufacturing firms (Mahran and Elamer, 2024). Drawing on paradox theory, this study argues that the coexistence of humility and narcissism in CEOs can drive effective environmental performance (Zhang et al., 2017). While narcissism motivates high-profile environmental initiatives to gain visibility, humility encourages a long-term, value-driven approach aligned with sustainability (Chatterjee and Hambrick, 2007; Sun et al., 2021). By adopting a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to analyze responses from 201 managers, this study identifies CEO trait configurations that promote environmental commitment across managerial levels, showing how these traits complement each other to improve corporate environmental strategies. The results also provide insights into a company’s internal dynamics, revealing the critical link between the CEO, top management's commitment and involvement, and the company’s environmental performance. This study concludes that top management’s environmental commitment and involvement, alongside the paradoxical traits of CEO narcissism and humility, is essential in driving the strategic adoption of environmental practices to achieve high levels of environmental performance. Together, these three studies aim to provide a perspective on the interplay between corporate governance structures, board composition, CEO psychological characteristics, and environmental challenges and outcomes. This research contributes to the broader field of corporate governance, advancing corporate sustainability agendas and promoting new knowledge to ensure that companies align their strategic objectives with pressing and still distant environmental demands.