The understanding of the board of a corporation and its behavior is limited, despite the board’s societal

importance. We present a contingency approach to the board’s functional emphasis, considering a

fourth function in addition to monitoring, decision making, and service or resource provision. The

additional function is conflict resolution (or principal identification). The approach contrasts with

mainstream research by assuming that the firm is a nexus of investments, avoiding the empirical

assumption that the shareholder is the sole principal. We derive propositions that are not restricted to

any empirical category of a corporation, and address praxis implications for managing functional

disharmony.