This study explores the relationship between diversity in board composition and the degree of a firm's international activity. Specifically, we posit that board resource variety has a positive relationship with the international activity of the firm and that the strength of board faultlines moderates this relationship. Using data collected from Spanish public companies over the period 2005 to 2010, our analysis shows strong support for our hypotheses. Our work contributes to the literature on board's diversity by demonstrating that board resource variety should be captured by considering “the director profile” rather than any single attribute and that this type of variety can engender subgroups that weakens its benefits. Therefore, our results have implications for the strategic management challenge international firms face when they put together their boards. A corporate board needs to structure itself in such a way as to benefit from the wealth of the variety of its resources, but without succumbing to the risks posed by conflicts between subgroups arising from the presence of faultlines.

本研究探讨了董事会组成的多样性与公司国际活动程度之间的关系。具体而言，我们假设董事会资源多样性与公司的国际活动呈正相关，董事会断层线的强度缓和了这种关系。使用从 2005 年到 2010 年期间从西班牙上市公司收集的数据，我们的分析表明我们的假设得到了强有力的支持。我们的工作通过证明应该通过考虑“董事简介”而不是任何单一属性来捕捉董事会资源的多样性，并且这种类型的多样性会产生削弱其利益的子群体，从而为董事会多样性的文献做出了贡献。所以，我们的结果对国际公司在组建董事会时所面临的战略管理挑战有影响。公司董事会需要以这样的方式构建自身，以便从其丰富的资源中受益，但又不屈服于由于断层线的存在而引起的子集团之间的冲突所带来的风险。