Chief Executive Personality and Corporate Strategy and Structure in Small Firms
Abstract
An empirical investigation of 97 firms was conducted to determine the relationships that three aspects of the chief executive's (CEO's) personality have with the strategies, structures, decision making methods and performance of their firms. CEO flexibility was associated with niche strategies, simple, informal structures, and intuitive, risk-embracing decision making. CEO need for achievement was related to broadly focussed, marketing-oriented strategies, formal and sophisticated structures, and proactive, analytical decision making. Executives with an internal locus of control pursued more product innovation, were more future oriented, and tailored their approaches to the circumstances facing their firms. The relationships between personality and organizational characteristics were found to be by far the strongest in small firms and also somewhat more significant in dynamic environments. Flexibility and locus of control related to corporate performance under certain conditions; need for achievement did not.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The strategies are not conceived by owner-managers as structural, for example as configurations of products and services, or segmentation of customers relative to competitors.
“They are not conceived by the owner-managers as structural, for example as might be configurations of products and services, or segmentation of customers relative to competitors (d'Amboise and Muldowney, 1988;Gartner, 1985;Miller and Toulouse, 1986;Storey, 1994).”
From ‘Relationships Mean Everything’; A Typology of Small–Business Relationship Strategies in a Reflexive Context (2002) · cites this paper as Miller and Toulouse, 1986
No citation lists for this paper
No citation lists for this paper yet — checked again daily.
References 40 · Cited by 780
- Authors
- Miller, D., & Toulouse, J.-M.
- Affiliations
- McGill University (CA)
- HEC Montréal (CA)
- ORCID
- Miller, Danny
- Venue
- Management Science
- Published
- 1986-11
- Volume
- 32
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 1389-1409
- ISSN
- 0025-1909 (ISSN-L)
- 1526-5501
- OpenAlex
- W2117608563
- Cited by
- 780
- References
- 40
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 16 · 2024: 19 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 26 · 2021: 25 · 2020: 28 · 2019: 17 · 2018: 36 · 2017: 26 · 2016: 21 · 2015: 33 · 2014: 38 · 2013: 40 · 2012: 53
- FWCI
- 14.95
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Management Science (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Management of Technology and Innovation › Entrepreneurship Studies and Influences
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Management of Technology and Innovation › Organizational Management and Leadership
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Management and Organizational Practices
- Keywords
- need for achievement, locus of control, business strategy, organizational structure, decision-making, small business, firm performance, niche strategy, product innovation, dynamic environments
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
