Enhancing Board Effectiveness

3Codes for Boards of Directors

A Law and Morality and Organisational Differences Perspective

David Williamson and Gary Lynch-Wood

Introduction

Following a review of codes of ethics and codes of conduct for boards of directors (BoD), the chapter goes on to explore the factors that can influence their efficacy and performance. While there might be many ways of doing this, the internal morality of law, which Lon Fuller (1964) provides as a measure of legal efficacy, alongside firm differences and what we refer to as the ‘conditions’ of regulation, provide the basis for our assessment. An evaluation of the UK Corporate Governance Code (2016), and, to a lesser extent, bespoke voluntary codes of ethics and conduct, is then undertaken. This leads ...