Power appears to be growing in independent director circles in the United Kingdom, according to a survey.
The UK placed a great emphasis on the role of the independent director on boards of companies after the issue of the famous Cadbury report in the early 1990s.
Hong Kong only recently got on the non-executive independent director bandwagon. The initiative to date appears to be having very mixed results.
As yet no one has come up with evidence that non-executive directors in Hong Kong either add value to the boards' work or protect investor interests. There have been some very public instances when it has been obvious non-executive directors have not fulfilled one or other of these goals.
A survey of 480 independent directors in the UK by Top Pay Research Group found this band of inside watchdogs was growing in confidence with the more experience they gained.
The research said there has been a dramatic increase in the percentage of independent directors who felt they had enough power to collectively influence a board's activities.
The number who said they were able to take action against an under-performing director rose from 75 per cent to 88 per cent, between 1995 and 1996. The same margin of change, to 88 per cent of the sample, applied to being able to control an executive director's compensation.
