Corporate Governance Royal Bank of Canada

Board diversity review (Royal bank of Canada) Format: Written report of 2000 words (tolerance of +10%) Weight: 40% The first assessment researches into the issue of board diversity in an organisation of your choice. The assessment that follows aims to generate a report where a critical discussion and in-depth analysis of the topic is provided. Background A current debate in practice and academia is board diversity (Tricker 2019). Diversity in the context of corporate governance can have various meanings. Diversity in the boardroom among directors could be, in some circumstances, attributable to organisation type, for example, certain not-for-profit and charities, private, public or listed organisations, and which sector or industry an organisation is in (Ellingrud 2020). The characteristics or traits of diversity could, for example, include age, ethnicity, gender, race, religiosity, skills, among others (e.g. see AICD 2020; Culbert & Grewal 2020; Ellingrud 2020; Loop & Bromilow 2018). A related literature investigates overlapping directors, busy and interlocked boards (Srinivasan et al. 2018). Task Conduct a review of board diversity, at an organisation you select, as a corporate governance issue and write a critical and in-depth report about your findings. Use the concepts, tools and techniques learned in this subject to review board diversity issues in your selected organisation at the individual director, committee and board levels. Format Your assessment submission must include the following: Define and briefly describe board diversity as a corporate governance issue.Provide a brief description of board diversity at your selected organisation (current situation and recent past changes, etc.).Provide an outline of the laws, rules, corporate governance theories or philosophies, standards, guides, principles or risks learnt in this subject relevant to board diversity in the location of your organisation.Critically analyse and evaluate for your selected organisation, their board diversity applying the relevant laws, rules, corporate governance theories or philosophies, standards, guides, principles or other tools and techniques learnt during this subject.Reason where your organisation is positioned in a wider classification (for example, industry, sector, country level) of board diversity and why it is a leader or laggard.Provide explicit recommendations for suggested improvement based on your review.Write a summary of the main findings in your conclusions section. It is important to demonstrate your knowledge of the corporate governance issue and clearly reference your sources. Read about your issue in journal articles (i.e. using the AIB Online Library search facility GoogleScholar to access databases such as EBSCOHost, ABI/Inform, ScienceDirect and JSTOR), books (including the textbook), industry reports, entity reports, business literature, etc. Remember to note down your sources while researching and reference them correctly in the report. To do well in this assessment, you need to: structure your discussion appropriatelyuse paragraphs of 3–8 sentencesnot write in the first person or too descriptivelywrite critically and in-depth and include citations where appropriate (i.e. Author-Date, page number(s))use double quote marks for direct quotations of 30 words or less and indent quotations over 30 words with no quote marksuse appropriate in-text citations (i.e. Author-Date)use appropriate in-text citations when paraphrasing/summarising other authors’ works and especially entity factssource tables/figures (even in appendices) appropriatelyuse and reference credible sourcesclearly link recommendations to the description and analysis presented earlier in the report. Example heading structure Executive Summary (i.e. 250 words or less) Table of Contents 1. Introduction  2. Legislation and board diversity 3. Theory and board diversity 4. Organisation benchmarked with corporate governance principles or guidelines 5. Committees and board diversity 6. Board diversity impact on conformance and performance 7. Board risks of little or no diversity 8. Recommendations 9. Conclusions References (i.e. with at least five credible source references; closer to 10 would be better)