Intellectual Capital Performance and Board Characteristics of GCC Banks

This paper examines the relationship between board of directors’ characteristics (educational level diversity, nationality diversity, board interlocking, board size and number of independent directors) and intellectual capital performance in a sample of 147 banks in Gulf Cooperation council (GCC) countries for the period 2008-2010. The results show that IC performance of GCC listed banks is low. In contrast to our expectation, the number of independent directors has a significant negative relationship with IC performance of GCC listed banks. All other variables are not associated with IC performance.