Regarding Board of Directors compensation here in the US, I would say it is all over the map. I have a fair number of individual stock holdings in my portfolio and carefully look at the BODs during proxy season so that I can cast an itelligent vote. Companies such as Berkshire-Hathaway compensate BOD members quite low as that's in keeping with Buffett's philosophy. Compensation includes more than the yearly monetary remuneration and can include stock and stock options as well. I mentioned Elaine Chao's presence on the Wells Fargo board in an earlier post and that's the gift that keeps on giving as she received another payout earlier this years because of stock option. Now maybe she donated this to charity to avoid any conflict of interest but that has not been disclosed. We have a good friend who was a US Trade Representative in a past administration who served on Intel, Estee Lauder, and one other board that I cannot remember. That person's yearly compensation excluding stock and stock options was $950K/year and this was back in 2014 when I looked at the data.
In the US, a lot of people go on BODs for political reasons and quota filling. Sometimes they have an understanding of the company and sometimes not.
I live in a town with lots of board-of-directors types, who do very well from it. It's part of the way many people live off what I consider to be "rigged" money, rather than "work" money. The circle works like this: the board and the CEO, who is sometimes chairman of the board and sometimes not, pay each other extremely well, the intention being that any board member who is collecting big bucks for doing almost nothing is not going to vote against the CEO, who probably recruited them, and who may be collecting huge bucks with the board's approval (and actually doing quite a bit of work, but not always well.) There's virtually no way to break that circle, especially with big companies, when voting for the board is rarely a serious matter. Occasionally, a hedge fund or buy-out company may force a board change, but that's usually so the hedge fund or buy-out company can make already bigger bucks that they're already making, for doing not much except arranging large loans of money made easy by the Fed. I've now served on three boards, all non-profits, which are not the same kind of deal, although even there, the board is often rigged in favor of the President or CEO. (See Wounded Warrior.) What I have found is that boards are usually recruited by the CEO, perfunctoraly approved by the other board members, and so the CEO almost always has a majority of the board on his side, no matter how corrupt the operation may be or become. I have to say, I was absolutely astonished when the McDonald's board fired their CEO for having a consensual, but forbidden, relationship with an underling. What astonished me isn't that CEOs are occasionally fired for such a thing, but that the said CEO almost doubled the stock price in five years...and that the board must have known that the firing would produce an immediate drop in the stock price, which it did.
