A systematic literature review on the determinants of corporate governance for firm performance: evidence from India

The objective of this study is to identify the corporate governance factors explored in the area of firm performance for Indian firms that cover the period from 2014 to 2025 (post-introduction of the Companies Act, 2013) by adopting a systematic approach. Further, this study examines the publishing patterns with regard to the year, Journal and firm classification, in the context of corporate governance and firm performance. The review also discovers the key theories that have been applied in the field. For the attainment of the objectives, the paper uses Web of Science, Scopus, EBSCO and Google Scholar databases to retrieve relevant articles and encapsulates 137 articles for the review. The analysis reveals that over the years, the publication trend is rising upward with studies emphasizing more on nonfinancial firms. Some of the top Journals with publications in this area are “The IUP Journal of Corporate Governance,” “Indian Journal of Corporate Governance,” “International Journal of Disclosure and Governance” and “Corporate Governance.” In addition, the research study finds that theories such as agency, resource dependence, stewardship and upper echelon are most commonly used in the literature. From the research papers reviewed, the following themes emerge as significant: “Board,” “Ownership,” “Diversification,” “Business” and “Personality Traits in Management.” The authors have applied NVivo and MAXQDA software to generate the themes. The existing literature has predominantly examined the aforementioned topics and the results reveal conflicting findings on multiple counts for key factors, which include CEO duality, board size, promoter shareholdings, presence of female directors and proportion of independent directors on the board. To conclude, this study provides a one-stop summary, insights, knowledge gaps and recommendations to the regulators, corporate management, academicians and interested researchers for future research endeavors within this domain.