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Corporate governance is a phenomenon with far-reaching influence and a topic that has received sustained interest from scholars and practitioners (Shleifer and Vishny, 1997; Westphal and Zajac, 2013). Since the inception of corporate governance research, one of the most vibrant areas of study has been board interlocks (Gulati and Westphal, 1999). A board interlock is a tie created by two firms sharing a common director (Burt, 1980; Mizruchi, 1996). Research on board interlocks has spanned many disciplines, including work in finance (Core et al. , 1999), management (Gulati and Westphal, 1999; Shropshire, 2010; Zajac and Westphal, 1996) and sociology (Kono et al. , 1998; Mizruchi et al. , 2006; Sorenson and Stuart, 2001).
Board interlocks reflect complex inter-organizational relationships. Scholars suggest that interlock activities can help firms manage environmental uncertainty and dependence (Useem, 1984), provide access to diverse and unique information (Haunschild and Beckman, 1998), enable the spread of new corporate practices (Davis, 1991; Palmer et al. , 1993) and serve as a signal of a firm's quality (Certo, 2003; Higgins and Gulati, 2003; Kang, 2008). Moreover, they can facilitate key processes, such as diffusion (Davis, 1991; Strang and Soule, 1998) and learning (Beckman and Haunschild, 2002), which can, in turn, impact firm performance (Davis and Cobb, 2010; Hillman et al. , 2009; Pfeffer, 1983).
Mizruchi (1996) offered one of the first assessments of the accumulated research on board interlocks almost 20 years ago. As he explains, a central question of the interlocks research has been and continues to be "What do interlocks do?" Yet, given the importance of board interlocks and the explosion of research on the topic since Mizruchi's review, it is surprising that there has not been an updated comprehensive review of the board interlocks literature in nearly two decades. Further, as described in detail below, the board interlocks literature is increasingly fragmented. Although it draws on several disciplines and makes use of a variety of theoretical perspectives, there is no unified understanding of how the literature's findings fit together. For instance, foundational issues, such as identifying the key antecedents and outcomes of interlock activities, have not been systematically reviewed.
To address this need for a review, we offer an assessment and integration of the thriving, yet disparate, research on board interlocks....