Resumen: This study not only revisits, from a meta-analytic perspective, the influence of firms'' boardroom independence on corporate financial performance, but also addresses the way that countries'' social and institutional contexts moderate that connection. A meta-regression covering 126 independent samples reveals that firms'' boardroom independence has a positive and negative effect on accounting and market-based measures of corporate financial performance, respectively. Further analyses reveal that while the firms'' board independence-financial performance connection is stronger in non-communitarian societies, that relationship becomes weaker in countries with greater developed mechanisms to protect the interest of minority investors. These results are robust to different model specifications and to the presence of a set of methodological control variables. Our results are of outstanding relevance for companies'' board composition processes by suggesting the way that corporations should actively re-balance the proportion of independent directors across different social and institutional contexts to ensure their financial success. Idioma: Inglés DOI: 10.3390/su11247121 Año: 2019 Publicado en: Sustainability (Basel) 11, 24 (2019), 7121 [25 pp.] ISSN: 2071-1050 Factor impacto JCR: 2.576 (2019) Categ. JCR: ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES rank: 120 / 265 = 0.453 (2019) - Q2 - T2 Categ. JCR: ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES rank: 53 / 123 = 0.431 (2019) - Q2 - T2 Categ. JCR: GREEN & SUSTAINABLE SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY rank: 26 / 41 = 0.634 (2019) - Q3 - T2 Categ. JCR: GREEN & SUSTAINABLE SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY rank: 6 / 8 = 0.75 (2019) - Q3 - T3 Factor impacto SCIMAGO: 0.581 - Energy Engineering and Power Technology (Q2) - Environmental Science (miscellaneous) (Q2) - Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment (Q2) - Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law (Q2) - Geography, Planning and Development (Q2)