Does Board Size Matter for Taiwanese Hotel Performance? Agency Theory or Resource Dependence Theory

Due to the fast growing hotel industry in Taiwan, recent hospitality studies has paid attention to how various factors affect the Taiwanese hotel performance and offered interesting and valuable findings. To expand the financial literature of the Taiwanese hotel industry and the hospitality literature as a whole, this article is the first hospitality study to investigate how board size affects firm performance of publicly traded hotels in Taiwan. Panel regression test results reveal an interesting finding. Specifically, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between board size and hotel performance in terms of return on assets, return on equity, and Tobin’s Q with an optimal value of board size equal to 10. This indicates that while board size up to 10 has a positive impact on hotel performance (supporting the resource dependence theory), board size can deteriorate hotel performance when it is larger than 10 (supporting the agency theory).