The Effects of CEO Founder Status and Stock Ownership on Entrepreneurial Orientation in Small Firms

This paper studies how governance drives entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in small firms. We argue that founder status and ownership create powerful personal incentives for small firm CEOs to engage in behaviors that influence EO. Integrating stewardship theory and the principal-principal branch of agency theory, we test our hypotheses on a sample of 339 Swedish firms, and find that CEO founder status is significantly and positively associated...