While corporate governance and strategic management have for a long
time suffered from artificial separation and, therefore, generally been tackled in a
secluded manner, their combined organizational impact makes them stringently
related to one another in the firms’ evolution. In this paper, we argue that, transcending
the ‘‘silo view’’ of corporate governance and strategic management, time
has come to acknowledge that, depending on circumstances and time periods, within
a firm is possible to detect the relative dominance of corporate governance over
strategic management, rather than the leadership of strategic management over
corporate governance. Drawing on a contingency approach, we dissect the relationships
(and the mechanisms that control it) between the strategic function (i.e.,
which defines the firms’ strategy and supervisions its implementation) and the
governance function (i.e., the congruence assessment between the firm strategy
selected and the interests of the ownership and of other relevant stakeholders represented
in the board of directors and the effectiveness appraisal of the entrepreneurial
action). Then, by performing a thorough retrospective qualitative analysis of
three relevant case-histories of Italian firms (Fiat, Telecom Italia and Unicredit)
operating in three different industries (automobile, banking and telecommunications),
we surmise that, either in corporate governance (board) oriented or in