Vol.:(0123456789) Review of Managerial Science https://doi.org/10.1007/s11846-019-00347-2 1 3 ORIGINAL PAPER Interlocking directorates and dynamic corporate performance: the roles of centrality, structural holes and number of connections in social networks Wei‑Kang Wang 1  · Wen‑Min Lu 2  · Qian Long Kweh 3  · Mohammad Nourani 4  · Rong‑Suei Hong 1 Received: 27 September 2018 / Accepted: 24 July 2019 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract This study investigates how interlocking directorates afect dynamic corporate per- formance among 187 Taiwanese electronics companies during a 3 year sampling period (2013–2015). This study consists of two stages. First, this study measures the operational efciency of electronics companies using the dynamic slacks-based measure model of data envelopment analysis. Second, this study adopts a truncated- regression model with bootstrap to examine the impacts of interlocking directorates on dynamic corporate performance. The empirical fndings of this study indicate that centrality (direct connections), structural holes (indirect connections), and the number of connections (total connections) related to interlocking directorates have signifcant positive infuences on the dynamic corporate performance of Taiwanese electronics companies. The results suggest that more interlocks at the board level leads to better corporate performance over a long-term period. Overall, this study uses social network analysis to shed light on the role of interlocking directorates and its importance to dynamic corporate performance from the resource dependence perspective. Keywords Social network · Interlocking directorates · Corporate performance · Data envelopment analysis · Dynamic slacks-based measure Mathematics Subject Classifcation 90B50 · 90C39 · 91D30 JEL Classifcation L25 · L1 · G30 * Qian Long Kweh qlkweh@gmail.com Extended author information available on the last page of the article