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Research has focused primarily on the antecedents that influence the risk taking of CEOs themselves. This study examines how an important event experienced by a CEO at a direct rival firm influences a CEO's risk-taking. It also examines how prior firm performance relative to aspirations moderates the relationship.

In order to test the hypothesis, the authors perform an a difference-in-differences methodology.

Using a difference-in-differences methodology, we find that when a CEO wins a prestigious CEO award, competitor CEOs increase their firm risk-taking in the post-award period. The proclivity becomes stronger when their prior firm performance relative to aspirations is better. These findings suggest that a CEO winning a prominent CEO award influences competitor CEOs' risk-taking.

This study contributes to the literature on managerial risk-taking by highlighting that a star CEO winning a prominent award may serve as a striving aspiration and induce competitor CEOs to take risks, and that two different types of aspirations – striving and competitive aspirations – interact to influence the competitor CEOs' risk-taking.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between CEO ownership, stock option compensation, and risk taking. The authors include important CEO power variables as moderators.

The paper uses a longitudinal regression analysis. In addition, the paper includes interactional plots for further interpretation.

The results indicate that CEO ownership reduces risk taking, while there is a partial support that stock options increase risk taking. CEO tenure is a powerful moderator that decreases risk taking in both CEO ownership and CEO stock option scenarios. Board independence, counter to the hypothesis in this paper, may encourage risk taking.

The findings in this paper provide support for the inclusion of CEO power variables in CEO compensation studies. However, the study examines large publicly traded companies; thus, all findings may not be applicable to small- and medium-sized companies.

Scholars have encouraged more complex CEO compensation models and the authors have examined both main effect and interaction models.

The current paper studies how CEO attributes could influence corporate risk-taking. The authors examine the effects of CEO demographic attributes and CEO position's attributes on financial and strategic risk-taking.

This study is drawn on non-financial firms listed on the SBF120 index, between 2001 and 2013.

First, long-tenured CEOs are prone to decrease the total risk and the leverage ratio. Second, despite the many CEOs have political connections; they are not prone to engage in risky decisions not serving the business' interests. Third, old CEOs are likely to rely on debt to fund internal growth. Moreover, business and science-educated CEOs behave differently in terms of risk-taking. Finally, the authors show that CEOs' attributes have less influential effects in family firms than in non-family firms. Also, they seem to have more significant associations with risk-taking during and after the financial subprime crisis.

This paper examines how cognitive traits could shape investments decisions, in terms of risk preferences.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the existing literature on the relationship between firm-level risk and returns and to explore other ways of measuring firm risk-taking. Literature overwhelmingly shows a negative relationship between firm-level risk and returns based on accounting data, which is counter-intuitive from the rational perspective of risk-aversion. This paper revisits this so-called Bowman’s paradox by examining the wealth of literature on the topic and empirically tests alternative measures of firm risk-taking that could provide a counter-argument on the existence of the paradox.

After formulating the criteria for such a measure, potential measures of firm risk-taking were developed based on variability of some key financial ratios and empirically tested using US listed companies’ data for several time periods from 1992 to 2016. Literature has explored the use of these financial ratios (e.g. R&D expenses as percentage of sales) based only on their magnitude. This paper is novel in that it examines the variability and not just the magnitude of these parameters.

Results showed the same counter-intuitive negative relationship between firm risk-taking and returns but the paper was able to identify an area for future theory development that hopefully will lead to a firm risk-taking measure that would exhibit the elusive positive relationship with returns.

The literature review of this paper brought together and provided a succinct classification of the various explanations for Bowman’s paradox that allowed the identification of a potentially rich area of research. It identified a gap in the literature which is the formulation of suitable measures of firm risk-taking and made investigations in this area.

Given the critical mass of literature on entrepreneurial risk-taking, the purpose of this paper is to assess the contribution to the knowledge so far by exploring important themes in the literature on entrepreneurial risk-taking.

The review is organized around four themes: nature of entrepreneurial risk-taking; antecedents of entrepreneurial risk-taking; context of entrepreneurial risk-taking; and outcomes of entrepreneurial risk-taking. The author critically evaluates the literature on each theme and presents the pointers for future research.

Literature does provide a holistic view encapsulating different dimensions of entrepreneurial risk-taking, but it has produced largely inconsistent findings in terms of risk and gender, risk propensity of entrepreneurs in comparison to non-entrepreneurs and the outcomes of entrepreneurial risk-taking. Organizational antecedents, non-financial measures and ethical- and health-related consequences of entrepreneurial risk are underexplored. Inconclusive literature also implies that the risk may not be a distinguishing or important factor for undertaking an entrepreneurial endeavor. Therefore, it is pertinent to explore the critical factors entrepreneurs consider (or not consider) while marshalling their resources to embark on an entrepreneurial journey. This posits the need to explore an entrepreneur’s informal approach toward risk-taking.

Suggested pointers of future research will potentially enhance the theoretical understanding of entrepreneurial risk-taking.

The purpose of the paper is to examine the gender composition and structure of the board of directors in not‐for‐profit organisations and their relation to firm‐level entrepreneurship.

Data were collected through a survey sent to Swedish riding schools. The paper focuses on not‐for‐profit associations and the analysis is based on 60 respondents. The data were analysed by multivariate methods.

The overall gender composition of boards had no influence on firm‐level entrepreneurship. However, a high proportion of women in powerful positions were found to have a positive influence on one of the study's two dimensions of firm‐level entrepreneurship, i.e. strategic opportunism. No influence concerning gender in powerful positions was found on risk taking, the other dimension of firm‐level entrepreneurship.

The attention to gender composition not only focuses on the board at large, but also highlights the specific positions of the chairperson, secretary and treasurer in the board structure. Another valuable insight concerns firm‐level entrepreneurship, here treated as a two‐dimensional concept, consisting of strategic opportunism and risk taking, which finds support in the analysis. Further, the empirical data were collected from an industry that includes a high proportion of women on the boards, i.e. the Swedish riding school industry. The study contributes to the debate concerning the gender composition on the board of directors where a high proportion of women in powerful positions is positively related with strategic opportunism.

Measuring behavior requires research methods that can capture observed outcomes and expose underlying processes and mechanisms. In this chapter, we present a toolbox of instruments and techniques we designed experimental tasks to simulate decision environments and capture behavior. We deployed protocol analysis and text analysis to examine the underlying cognitive processes. In combination, these can simultaneously grasp antecedents, outcomes, processes, and mechanisms. We applied them to collect rich behavioral data on two key topics in strategic management: the exploration–exploitation trade-off and strategic risk-taking. This mix of methods is particularly useful in describing actual behavior as it is, not as it should be, replacing assumptions with data and offering a finer-grained perspective of strategic decision-making.

This empirical research seeks to evaluate purchasing practices in Taiwan based on survey data collected from companies located in that country. A research model is presented and tested using structural equation modeling. The model includes three factors: purchasing risk taking, purchasing knowledge and skills, and strategic purchasing. The research findings indicate that purchasing risk‐taking impacts purchasing knowledge and skills and purchasing knowledge and skills impacts strategic purchasing. Also, the study finds that the relationships among risk taking, purchasing knowledge and skills and strategic purchasing for high performing firms are stronger than for low performing firms.

Executives exert a pervasive influence on the organizations they lead. As such, scholars have long considered how to calibrate the risks inherent in executive decision making, often relying on incentives and compensation to calibrate executive risk behavior. However, there are shortcomings that reduce the efficacy of this approach, largely because incentives and compensation do not alter the work environment itself, which play a significant role influencing executive risk behavior. Consequently, in this chapter, we propose a conceptualization that integrates executive risk-taking with work design, framing three central features of the strategic leader job and work environment that may be manipulated to channel and shape executive risk-taking. Specifically, accountability, discretion, and relationships are proposed as the key higher-order characteristics of the executive work context, and they are examined with respect to optimal calibration in order to maximize both executive performance and well-being, as well as organizational coordination and control. Implications of this conceptualization and directions for future research are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to examine if corporate entrepreneurship in terms of innovation and proactivity that has been developed in the international joint ventures (IJVs) in the Chinese cultures.

A structured questionnaire with a systematic sampling approach was adopted and sent to 800 firms (400 from the manufacturing industry and 400 from the servicing industry) in Beijing. Descriptive statistics, correlation analyses and stepwise multiple regression were used.

Corporate entrepreneurship exists in the IJVs, yet the Western‐Chinese JVs are more innovative and proactive. It is found that organisational variables such as flexibility, operational delegation, control system and the implementation of differentiation or growth strategy are significantly related to both innovation and proactivity. However, organisational variables on strategic delegation and risk‐taking culture are significantly related to proactivity only. On the other hand, the implementation of cost leadership is found to be unrelated to either innovation or proactivity.

Since the sample was drawn from IJVs in Beijing, comparative studies could be done on IJVs across different cities in China.

The significant results provide insights for studying the cultural context of China's IJVs.

Asian‐Chinese JVs have to improve corporate entrepreneurship posture in their management. This will attract professionals with international experience from different parts of the world to work in China's IJVs.

The entrepreneurial posture of an IJV can be measured in terms of its ability on innovation and proactivity. It provides benefits to both foreign and local partners in terms of local knowledge, access to market, and cost consideration as well as technological and skills transfers.