Our study has several limitations that should be addressed in further research. Firstly, while we have provided evidence of the mediating role of strategic decision-making processes between the Greek executives’ demographic characteristics and innovation, we cannot assume that those demographic characteristics are exhaustive predictors of innovation strategies. There are still other personality or composition characteristics such as board size, leadership structure, interlocking directors, need for achievement, locus of control, risk attitude and tolerance for ambiguity that have not been incorporated in the theoretical model. Secondly, the study examined the mediating effect of the strategic decision-making process between board of directors’ characteristics and the outcome of innovation. The construct of innovation captures several innovation elements including product, process and organizational innovation but it does not capture the different innovation adoption phases.
Thirdly, the study is explanatory, cross-sectional and self reporting in nature. Therefore, the findings are limited to the relationships of associations. A longitudinal study could help us to deal with the problem of endogeneity and reverse causality. Also, a single respondent for each firm has completed the questionnaire. This was due to the fact that it was difficult to obtain responses from all or most of board members due to their time constraint but also due to the sensitive nature of the data. In future research, the multiple respondents per firm would be highly recommended in order to minimize the effects of systematic response bias. Finally, the sample of our study consists only of publicly listed organizations from various industries, a fact that does not allow us to make generalisations at the industry level. Also, the data are limited to companies of one country. Further research of a longitudinal nature will give us useful insights to either support or refute these relationships.
Based on the current findings, we would like to point out some avenues for future research. First, our findings might encourage the continuation of theoretical and empirical research on strategic management and innovation. Future empirical research might include a different set of characteristics. Second, future studies could also examine the effect of environment on innovation, perhaps its moderating role on innovation. Apart from the strategic choice perspective, it will be interesting to apply economic, social and psychological theories in an effort to examine innovation from a contingency perspective. Third, the findings of the study are based on cross-sectional data; a next logical step in this line of research would be to investigate the relationship between innovation and performance outcomes over a period of time, treating contextual variables as potential moderators. A more accurate approach to understand the causal relationships between decision antecedents and process requires the adoption of longitudinal research design. Future research using qualitative and longitudinal methods (Kesner and Sebora, 1994) would be useful in examining the validity of our findings. Finally, studies on Boards of Directors have so far taken place predominantly in western and developed economies such as United States and the U.K, so future research might generate additional insights in cultural settings where Boards of Directors and innovation strategies are in their infancy. This will open up a promising research avenue on comparative decision-making practices across different cultural or national settings.