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The purpose of this paper is to explore how the risk management objectives of the firm's owners influence the organization's sustainability strategies with a particular focus on new sustainability related initiatives. Given shareholder objectives direct firm attention to refine organizational focus, the paper's main premise is that ultimately it is the ownership structure of the firm that sets the agenda in terms of sustainability initiatives. Considering the broad distinctions between family/founder ownership, corporate ownership and institutional ownership, the overall ownership structure of the firm will strongly influence the motivations and temporal considerations of the firm vis-à-vis sustainability related initiatives.

Within a resource-based view, the authors link first-mover advantages and sustainability strategies as a reflection of owners' perceptions of risk management and underlying motivations.

The authors postulate that firms with predominant family/founder ownership undertake sustainability-related initiatives as patient investors based on their ideological motivations, while corporate owners undertake initiatives with capabilities building orientation, with institutional owners adopting sustainability-related initiatives as a risk mitigation strategy.

Managers charged with developing sustainability strategies may add a further consideration, namely taking into account the risk management objectives of the owners of the firm, in choosing and justifying the type of sustainability innovation.

This conceptual paper provides a novel link between the first-mover advantage of sustainability initiatives and the ownership and governance of the organization. It contributes to the limited strategy research on ownership impact on sustainability initiatives and provides guidance to managers in developing appropriate strategies.

This paper aims to investigate a team dynamics based approach to assess board effectiveness, namely the interplay between boardroom decision-making processes and the board members' cognitive mental models.

A socio-cognitive perspective is utilized for analyzing board processes and determining board effectiveness. Utilizing the concepts of team mental models and sensemaking, a theoretically grounded model of board effectiveness is developed, wherein the propositions predict the causality and effect of the socio-cognitive and sensemaking processes on board effectiveness.

The proposed model is able to analyze the relationship among the different decision-making processes and members' cognitive models as determinants of board effectiveness, wherein the board's decision making process mediates the board's cognitive model – effectiveness relationship, while the board's cognitive model moderates the decision process – effectiveness relationship.

The conceptual model advances a rationale that might explain the mixed or modest findings in literature on the relationship between board demographics, dynamics and effectiveness.

The model allows practitioners and policy makers an alternative mechanism to assess board effectiveness, that is able to not only integrate the demographic, diversity and dynamics related measures, but also enables a clear understanding of the cognitive influences on board decision making and effectiveness.

The conceptual model encompasses most of the relevant constructs and findings of previous studies and offers a parsimonious yet holistic understanding of the boardroom mechanisms that might determine board effectiveness.