The trade-off between knowledge accumulation and independence: The case of the Shariah supervisory board within the Shariah governance and firm performance nexus

Adopting a resource dependence lens, this study examines the impact of the trade-off between knowledge accumulation and independence on the Shariah governance-firm performance nexus through a detailed examination of Shariah supervisory board tenure. Utilizing a unique, hand-collected dataset of 140 of the largest Islamic financial institutions over the period 2011–2015 and across 16 nations, we discover that Shariah supervisory board tenure is a positive, linear predictor of firm performance and that there is curvilinear relationship between tenure and the performance of Islamic financial institutions. Our findings provide novel contributions to the literature by disentangling the role and characteristics of the Shariah supervisory board and provide evidence for the existence of a trade-off between firm-based learning and independence of Shariah boards thus further highlighting the channels of transmission of these Shariah governance characterizations.