Past research has devoted lots of attention to exploring board functions, board composition, and board structures. However, our current knowledge on director mobility, including director selection and director exit, remains limited. Boards are consisting of individual directors. Without sufficient knowledge, companies may have a difficult time to establish and maintain efficient boards. In the first essay, I take a firm perspective to examine how network structural factors affect director selection. I argued that firms tend to select individuals who occupy superior network positions as directors. I then examine how the network structural positions of the recruiting firm may affect the proposed relationship. I find that firms prefer directors who occupy a brokerage position, which can bring more new and diversified knowledge into the firm. Further, the director's central position shows a strong network embeddedness effect to prevent directors from moving. In my second essay, I focus on the effect of network structural positions on director exit. I take an individual perspective to argue that directors serve on boards to obtain social capital. Therefore, directors who occupy advantageous network positions are more likely to exit from their current companies because those directors can better detect other companies which can enable them to accumulate social capital better. Further, I examined the contingency effect of their current firms' network structural position. Results suggest that directors who occupy a brokerage position to get information are more likely to exit from their current companies, while directors who occupy a central position experience strong network embeddedness effect and thus become less likely to exit. In my third essay, I adopted the stochastic actor-oriented models to explore at a network dyadic level, how recruiting firms and directors form appointment ties after the directors' exit from their current companies. I argued that directors tend to establish ties with recruiting companies which can help them reconstitute lost social capital, or gain new social capital. The number of existing indirect ties between individual directors and the recruiting companies and director gender are examined as two contingencies. The results suggest a strong network inertial effect probably caused by network embeddedness.
