Title: Trust, distrust and psychological ownership in strategic entrepreneurship-based tensions

Authors: Ville-Veikko Piispanen; Kaarlo J. Paloniemi; Antti Kauppinen

Addresses: Business School, University of Eastern Finland, P.O. Box 1627, FI-70211 Kuopio, Finland ' University of Oulu Business School, P.O. Box 4600, FI90014 Oulu, Finland ' School of Management, College of Business, RMIT University, 124 La Trobe Street, 3000 Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Abstract: Several studies have considered the chief executive officer (CEO) and that person's advantage-seeking (AS) and opportunity-seeking (OS) activities, including the CEO's trust and distrust of employees of large firms. Nevertheless, prior research does not offer an approach that assesses the potential link between those concepts in the context of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This paper aims to fill this gap by examining tension regarding CEOs' experiences in the business development (BD) of SMEs from the perspectives of AS, OS, trust (T), distrust (D) and psychological ownership (PO). The basis for a new theory is built here by first coding a CEO's narratives and recoding the material to the existing literature through cross-validation. The results of this study highlight that a CEO's strategic entrepreneurship (SE) activities, trusting and distrusting beliefs in board members (BMs) and PO affect the tension CEOs experience between the board members on an SME's business development.

Keywords: chief executive officer; CEO; tension; strategic entrepreneurship; opportunity-seeking; advantage-seeking; psychological ownership; balance; business development; trusting beliefs; distrusting beliefs; narrative.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESB.2022.122027

International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 2022 Vol.45 No.3, pp.396 - 421

Received: 22 May 2019
Accepted: 07 Jun 2019
Published online: 08 Apr 2022 *

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