CORPORATE GOVERNANCE, SUSTAINABILITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY: A WIN-WIN PARADIGM FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Corporate Governance (CG) topic has long interested and continues to attract the attention of scholars belonging to different disciplinary fields. In a context of globalization and constantly changing, effective governance becomes a strategic imperative for companies and, in this perspective, the analysis of the characteristics that distinguish it is included. In fact, on the one hand, CG is one of the fundamental drivers to the competitiveness of companies through the link that is established between governance and performance, on the other it affects the accountability of companies, since it is from the governance model that the breadth of responsibilities attributed to corporate decision makers and the effectiveness of control depend to which they are subjected. Corporate governance is a complex and multidisciplinary subject. It is no coincidence that in the literature there are different visions and definitions of corporate governance, depending on the privileged aspects. There are studies that attribute to corporate governance the purpose of exclusively protecting the interests of shareholders (Stapledon and Stapledon 1997, Gilson, 2005) and others according to which, instead, the corporate governance activity must contemplate the interests of all stakeholders (Green, 1993; Lenseen et al., 2010;). A common element of many of the studies on the subject, however, is the search for some relationship between corporate governance and company performance. A large part of the economic literature, in fact, has compared and continues to compare the different possible arrangements, in an analysis between the governance mechanisms and the effects on the performance of companies (Core et al, 1999; Brown and Caylor, 2004; Bhagat and Bolton, 2008). Recently, the idea has come forward that sustainability must be considered as another important performance of the company as well as firm financial performance (Artiach et al., 2010; Scahaltegger et al., 2006) The term sustainability derives from the verb to sustain and implies the process aimed at maintaining a certain state over time (Bologna, 2008). According to a more recent interpretation, the concept of corporate sustainability includes three dimensions, the economic, the social, and the environmental dimensions (WSSD, 2002). In literature, it is possible to recognize a growing consensus about a notion of corporate sustainability based on the idea of including three dimensions, the economic, the social and the environmental in strategic management (Benn et al.,2014). The basic idea is that the three pillars are linked as to influence each other. In this discussion, CSR constitutes a proactive starting point, at the same time a tool for investigating reality and the main glue to which operators and actions are linked in the sequential time frames and in the different experiences of corporate architecture that reflect the respective socio-cultural models of the geographical areas examined. The interest on the topic of gender diversity on a board of directors has contributed to the identification of the key point of the work itself, namely the concept of role and how the variations and implications of the same can invalidate the complex system of decisions. It is precisely starting from the superficial sociological definition of convergence of obligations, behavioral patterns and attitudes that connote the "role", that we begin to glimpse the vector of transposition from human to social of what constitutes the origin and nature of an action which, in the case of human cases, as in programmatic activities, is implemented through a decision. Where, the role succeeds in influencing the decision and, on the other hand, the decision manages to decline its effects in the various company areas that are involved and chained in the ordinary course of management, social responsibility begins to become the protagonist of a complex scene and, in the best cases, it can go on to earn directing. Studying the composition of the board of directors serves to outline how the mixing of certain qualitative requisites, which do not end, therefore, are able to humanize the company system, proposing on large scenarios, dynamics more banally associated with small environments. Through this process of humanization, the role, increasingly in company contexts combined with its intrinsic sense of power, is also analyzed with regard to the other side of the coin, in the concept of responsibility. How much can the same role affect the perception of responsibility in decisions and evaluations? As the person and the groups of people, the first centers of the expression of the will in the individual and in the aggregation, can strengthen the energy of their strategies through sensitivity to responsibility. How much sustainability can be pursued through an awareness of the social advantage that can derive from the attention of the individual, in a philanthropic and not mildly altruistic or opportunistic sense of collaboration. One of the objectives of the work is, therefore, to succeed in making the question on how the ethics in the role of the individual that becomes multitude succeed in contributing to the methodical accumulation of functional knowledge to establish a high-performance system as worthy of note. Moreover, this work wants to understand how and to what extent corporate governance mechanisms manage to influence the ability of companies to produce value and to achieve certain results in terms of overall performance, fundamental to understanding and addressing further changes and developments