Investigating the Relationship between Board Characteristics and the Sustainable Development of Companies Listed at Tehran Stock Exchange

The main objective of this paper is to investigate the relationship between board characteristics and the sustainable growth of companies listed at Tehran Stock Exchange. Board characteristics in this study include the size of the board, number of board meetings, the share of non-bound managers of the board, duality of managing director duties and maintaining shares of the Board of Directors. According to previous similar studies, firm size and financial leverage are considered as control variables. In this study, statistical population includes all companies listed at Tehran Stock Exchange. Some restrictions applied on the Statistical population and a sample consisted of 54 companies was selected. Data analysis was conducted on data collected from 2006 to 2012. Multiple linear regression analysis and correlation coefficient methods were used for data analysis and obtaining hypothesis test results. The results indicate that there is no significant relationship between the size of the board, share of non-bound managers of the board, number of board meetings, maintaining shares of the Board of Directors and sustainable growth while there is a significant negative relationship between Managing Director duality of duties and sustainable growth rate.