William Q Judge
College of Business & Public Administration, Old Dominion University

Abstract
In a recent review of the director selection process, Withers, Hillman and Cannella (2012) reported that despite a long-standing academic interest in how outside executives gain a seat on a board of directors, there is very little understanding as to how and why certain directors gain seats on the board of directors.

While there have been recent studies examining extant demographic characteristics of outside directors, we simply do not know how firms become aware of potential outside directors, who is involved in nominating directors, and why the final selection decision is made. Research has begun to explore how nominating committees function within European firms, but we do not have a comprehensive perspective regarding how outside directors recruited and selected into the firm more generally.

Our ultimate objective is to publish a rigorous inductive study of the actual, not inferred, director selection process. For this work-in-progress study, we are currently conducting systematic field interviews with a wide variety of outside directors in order to learn how they gained their board seat on a publicly-held firm listed on the NYSE or NASDAQ stock exchanges in the United States.

At the conference, I expect that most of our field interviews will be complete and I will provide some preliminary insights from our field data. Currently, we have completed interviews with nine male and female independent directors based in all four geographic regions of the United States, and they have provided detailed descriptions of 25 director selection processes.