Non-executive Directors in the Profit and Non-profit Sector: A Different Approach Towards Governance?

After the recent scandals and the introduction of new corporate governance codes, non-executive directors (NED's) and supervisors have started playing an increasingly important role in providing the ‘checks and balances’ of organizations. Little is known about the way in which NED's fulfill their supervisory role. This article compares NED's in profit organizations to those in non-profit organizations. The underlying research is only exploratory. The article is a closer analysis of the results obtained from the Dutch Non-executive Directors Survey 2007 . The results show that significant differences exist between NED's in profit and non-profit organizations. The practical relevance of this study is that it aims to highlight the differences of NED's within non-profit and profit organizations. An analysis of the differences may lead to a debate within society.