resign as director from / of the board

Question

I read a sentence in "The Hindu" which was:

Jet Airways' power couple Naresh Goyal and his spouse Anita Goyal on Monday resigned as directors from the board of the company.

Shouldn't there be "of" instead of "from" preceding the board?

Answer 1

Both are grammatical, but they have different structures, and so at least potentially different meanings.

Since resign normally takes a from argument, the sentence as printed must mean

... resigned (as directors) from the board ...

If you use of, it must have a different structure:

... resigned as [directors of the board] ...

In this case, I don't see much difference in meaning, but in other cases the difference could be significant.

I find the first to be more natural.

Answer 2

Someone may resign as chairman, member, president, etc. from membership, position, post, seat, etc.

If the position they occupied was (as in your sentence) director of the board of the company, they resign as director of the board (and may stay with the company, taking some other position), or resign as director of the board (of the company) from that company (and leave it).

In other words, the verb resign does collocate with from and as, and don't with of.

The source.

As for your sentence, I dare to suggest rephrasing it as

...they resigned from the company as directors of its board.

As a side note, since the noun board (in the context provided) means a group of people who are responsible for controlling and organizing a company or organization, each one of this group may be called director, i.e. a person in charge of an organization or of a particular part of a company’s business. Thence, the "as directors" part seems to be redundant, and the sentence may be shortened to

Naresh Goyal and his wife Anita Goyal resigned from the board of Jet Airways on Monday.

Answer 3

"Director of the Board" is a standard noun phrase. So is "member of the Board of Directors" with an essentially identical meaning.

[They] resigned as directors from the board of the company.

is perfectly grammatical and idiomatc. So is:

He resigned as a Director of the Board [of XYZco].

So is

He resigned from the Board of Directors.

He resigned from his position on the Board of Directors.

is a bit more formal. So is:

He resigned from his position as a Director [of XYZco].

The form:

They resigned from the company as directors of its board.

and other versions including "resigned from the company" seems to me to imply that the person/people resigning had been employees, which board members usually are not, and which was apparently not the case here.

One can "resign as {title}". One can resign "from {position}A" or "from {group}".

Answer 4

Here, you have to think about where the prepositional phrase references. It references the verb resigned. So the word from is more correct. A good way to check this is to remove as directors and see if the flow of the sentence remains in tact.

Jet Airways' power couple Naresh Goyal and his spouse Anita Goyal on Monday resigned from the board of the company.

Jet Airways' power couple Naresh Goyal and his spouse Anita Goyal on Monday resigned of the board of the company.

The second sentence sounds awkward using of twice.