5 Conclusion and discussion
In this study, we have looked at the impact of the balance of economic and non-economic goals on the (largely unstudied) satisfaction levels of CEOs in small firms. The central contribution of this article stems from the effort to bring together ideas from the entrepreneurship satisfaction literature (Cooper and Artz 1995), corporate governance studies on owner-CEO relationships (Tosi and Gomez-Mejia 1989; Hambrick and Finkelstein 1995), and the SEW approach (Gomez-Mejia et al. 2007) to examine how family ownership and the presence of family ties influence the sensitivity to past performance on CEOs’ overall satisfaction with the firm.
Our results suggest that ownership matters, in the sense that the impact of past economic performance on CEO satisfaction is largely determined by who controls the organization. Specifically, our results suggest that regardless of their family ties, CEOs’ satisfaction in small family firms will be less driven by financial performance than in non-family firms. Although we do not provide a direct measure of the importance of noneconomic goals, our research design controls for the pure economic performance of the firms, so we interpret this result as indirect (although preliminary) evidence of the heightened importance of non-economic goals in the case of family owners. Hence, in line with a major stream of the family firm literature (Gomez-Mejia et al. 2011), our theoretical and empirical analyses provide new ways of understanding the role played by the interplay between economic and non-economic factors on CEOs’ satisfaction in small family firms.
