فقط در مورد پول؟ رضایت مدیر اجرایی و عملکرد شرکت در شرکت های خانوادگی کوچک Just about money? CEO satisfaction and firm performance in small family firms

1 Introduction Understanding CEOs’ levels of satisfaction with a firm is important, since satisfaction influences the decision to continue and invest more time and resources in the firm or to exit the company (Cooper and Artz 1995; Gimeno et al. 1997). This is particularly true in the case of small firms in which CEOs play a central role in the decisionmaking process (Brockmann and Simmonds 1997; Jennings and Beaver 1997). Despite this, research on satisfaction is conducted primarily from the perspective of founders and entrepreneurs (Cooper and Artz 1995; Carree and Verheul 2012; Delgado-García et al. 2012), with little attention given to firm managers. While it is true that many small firms are led by their founder, others are run by a founder’s relative or by external managers with no ownership and/or family ties to the business. Thus, there is a need for more research to further understand what drives CEOs’ satisfaction with the business in the context of small firms. The entrepreneurship literature states that entrepreneurs’ satisfaction with their businesses will vary depending upon the performance levels being realized, as well as the entrepreneur’s initial goals and expectations (Cooper and Artz 1995; Van Gelder et al. 2007; Delgado-García et al. 2012). Specifically, it states that when entrepreneurs are motivated by non-economic goals, they obtain a greater Bpsychic income^ and thus are willing to accept lower economic returns when they gain personal satisfaction from the business (Gimeno et al. 1997). Hence, the impact of firm economic performance on entrepreneurs’satisfaction is contingent on the balance between their economic and non-economic goals. How this balance affects satisfaction with the firm in the case of CEOs is still unknown. Our paper represents a first step in this direction. We build on a long-standing tradition in the corporate governance literature suggesting that CEOs’strategic decisions are guided by the ownership structure of the firm (e.g., Tosi and Gomez-Mejia 1989; Hambrick and Finkelstein 1995; Baysinger et al. 1991). Ultimately, CEOs reflect the interests of owners, so their relative importance to economic and non-economic goals is likely to be influenced by who controls the organization. Based on that, we argue that in the case of CEOs, the firm ownership structure would be a main driver of their satisfaction with the firm. Consistent with our claim, we focus on a particular type of ownership, family ownership, and investigate whether the impact of firm economic performance on CEOs’ satisfaction varies in family relative to nonfamily firms. Our reasons for focusing on family businesses (i.e., businesses controlled by the members of a family) are twofold: firstly, family businesses are the most prevalent form of ownership (Boyd and Solarino 2016); secondly, the interplay between economic and non-economic goals is particularly relevant in the context of family businesses, given the heightened importance family owners place on the attainment of familycentered non-economic goals (Chrisman et al. 2012; Mahto et al. 2010; Gomez-Mejia et al. 2011). These goals are usually described in terms of socioemotional wealth (SEW) protection (Gomez-Mejia et al. 2007).