Corporate Governance of Norwegian Health Trusts with Sector Political Goals

Abstract

Since 2002, the ownership of Norwegian hospitals has been centralized to the state. The four regional health authorities are responsible for the management of the hospitals, and the actual performance is done by the subsidiary health trusts (or HFs). As state-owned enterprises with certain sector political goals, the corporate governance of the health trusts is not exactly the same as private enterprises which mainly pursue pure business goals. The survey which the thesis uses investigates the HF board members’ opinions on some issues of sector political goals and corporate governance. The main purpose of this thesis is to find the differences of the opinions among different groups of HF board members, and to study whether the differences are consistent with relevant theories such as motivation and management theories.

The data of the thesis is based on a questionnaire of the survey program Management of State-owned enterprises with sector political goals. The respondents of the survey cover all HF board members who are the target population of my research. Several quantitative methods, such as descriptive statistics and non-parametric tests, are chosen to detect the HF board members’ opinions and the differences of their opinions on the issues of sector political goals and corporate governance.

The analyses mainly show that, the appointed board members with macro and broad perspective pay more attention to sector political goals than the employee representatives with micro and specific perspective do. The appointed board members have more consciousness of responsibility, power and autonomy. The analyses also show that the appointed board members will be more likely to represent the sector interests, whereas the employee representatives prefer to represent business or public interests. Furthermore, the board members with public sector backgrounds pursue public interests, whereas the board members with private sector backgrounds prefer business interests. These findings indicate that, different ways of elections, different logic between politicians and medical workers, previous work experiences in public or private sectors and some other motivation or logic factors can lead to different opinions among HF board members.