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2009 ASAC Conference: Taïeb Hafsi and Gokhan Turgut Honoured

June 30, 2009

Professor Taïeb Hafsi, holder of the Walter J. Somers Chair in International Strategic Management, and doctoral student Gokhan Turgut were awarded an honourable mention in the Organizational Theory division for their paper presented at the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada conference, held in June in Niagara Falls. The conference theme was Creating Knowledge in the New Economy.

In their paper, entitled Deviance from ideal: when a homogeneous board makes mistakes, the co-authors presented the results of a study on demographic diversity among corporate directors on companies’ performance. They measured the effects on a sample of S&P 500 companies.

The results show that whereas director dissimilarity has limited impact on financial performance, which is consistent with previous work, it has some effect on social performance, which is “new and interesting,” according to the co-authors.