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The purpose of this paper is to provide an initial test of the validity of an intertemporal stewardship theory. This theory incorporates stewardship considerations, based on a foundation of spirituality, as well as financial considerations into financial decision‐making models.

Contends that successful contemporary companies incorporate both financial and stewardship considerations into their decision making. Fortune magazine's Global Most Admired Companies list was used to define company success. Using Fortune's reputational criteria, companies were differentiated in terms of level of success. Hypotheses were developed about the articulation of and emphasis on financial considerations and stewardship considerations as evidenced by the corporate mission for highly successful vs less successful companies. The hypotheses were tested using paired t‐tests on mission statement data developed for the top‐, middle‐, and bottom‐ranked companies in each of the global industry categories in the 2002 Fortune magazine list. The intent was to determine if hypothesis‐relevant features of the mission statements significantly differed for the companies that were ranked at the top, middle, and bottom of their industries.

The results of this analysis indicate that organizational success cannot be achieved by focusing primarily on financial or stewardship considerations, but rather company success depends upon emphasizing both financial and stewardship considerations within the context of a clearly articulated mission focus.

The research should be extended to cover more than a one‐year period. This will result not only in a test of validity over time but also a larger sample size.

The practical implications are threefold – for managers and for business professors and researchers. Managers should ensure that mission statements are sufficiently well articulated and focused, and that both financial and stewardship considerations are sufficiently emphasized. Business professors and researchers should use a new paradigm – incorporating both stewardship and financial considerations – for teaching and thinking about business and for conducting meaningful and realistic research.

The preeminence of financial considerations in business decision making is challenged in this article. We find that the most successful companies incorporate stewardship considerations as well as financial considerations into their decision making, at least as it is reflected in their missions. This article provides evidence that decision making can no longer be devoid of stewardship considerations if an organization is to survive and prosper over the long term.

Stewardship behavior is an important embodiment of the spirit of employee ownership, which is critical to the sustainability of companies, especially under the influence of the COVID-19 epidemic. Most previous studies have focused on how to motivate employees’ stewardship behavior, but little is known about how stewardship behavior affects employees themselves. The purpose of this study is to explore how employee stewardship behavior affects their work-family interface based on the conservation of resources (COR) theory.

In this study, structural equation modeling was conducted using two-wave survey data from 323 employees through three internet companies in Southern China.

Results reveal that engaging in stewardship behavior is positively correlated with both positive emotion and emotional exhaustion. Positive emotion and emotional exhaustion, in turn, mediate the effects of stewardship behavior on work–home interface. Family motivation influences the strength of the relationships between positive emotion or emotional exhaustion and work–family interface, that is, high family motivation strengthens the positive association between positive emotion and work–family enrichment and weakens the positive association between emotional exhaustion and work–family conflict.

This study suggests that managers should give employees more support and care to ease the worries of engaging in stewardship behavior. Also, organizations should recruit employees with high family motivation, which can reduce the negative effects of stewardship behavior on work–-family interface.

Based on an actor’s perspective, this study examines both the positive and negative effects of stewardship behavior on employees themselves, thereby increasing understanding of the dual effect of stewardship behavior. In addition, this study further elucidates the mechanisms that moderate the positive and negative effects of individual family motivation on their engagement in stewardship behavior within the COR theory.

Stewardship theory is an emergent approach for explaining leadership behavior, challenging the assumptions of agency theory and its dominance in corporate governance literature. This study revisits the agency and stewardship theories by seeking to answer whether chief executive officers (CEOs) in China are committed stewards or opportunistic agents.

Based on 5,165 observations of 1,036 listed companies in China over the period 2005–2010, the results suggest that the corporate governance mechanisms developed from the agency theory in the West are not necessarily applicable in the Chinese context.

This study supports the stewardship theory in its findings that empowering CEOs through the practice of CEO duality and longer CEO tenure have a positive effect on firm value in China. Additionally, the positive relationships between CEO duality, CEO tenure and firm value are strengthened by the number of executive directors on the board, and weakened by the number of independent directors on the board.

One size does not fit all. Leadership behaviors in China do not follow the agency assumptions inherent in Western practices, rather they favor the conditions of positive leadership expressed by the stewardship theory. Assuming that the motivations of managers in emerging markets such as China are similar to those in the West may lead to a poor fit between governance policies and the institutional context.

As one of the few studies to connect the theoretical debate between the agency and stewardship theories, this study presents new evidence to support the stewardship theory, thereby strengthening its theoretical importance and relevance in corporate governance literature.

This article focuses on the lesser-used notion of stewardship and stewardship-ism. Stewardship is a concept that has inspired the activities of several organizations whose mission is to preserve, protect and maintain natural, social and economic assets for the benefit of stakeholders and communities. As observed by Contrafatto and Bebbington (2013), stewardship has some resonance with current policy agendas that attend to the issues related to sustainable development, corporate social responsibility and accountability. Most of the existing works on stewardship provide several perspectives with the focus being either on normative foundations of stewardship or on its organizational and managerial implications. In particular, the stewardship-related literature offers a range of conceptions and approaches ranking from a relatively narrow view of the resources, sources and time frame of stewardship to very broad specification. In this article, the management, organization and accounting literature is analysed to propose a map of current theorizing on stewardship. In particular, drawing on the methodological approach adopted by Lowndes (1996), four theoretical vignettes have been proposed to illustrate different variants and approaches in stewardship framework. Each vignette provides a set of conceptual constructs, ideas and views to understand stewardship and stewardship-inspired behaviour. The variety of approaches/perspectives on stewardship, as illustrated from the analysis undertaken in this article, provides an opportunity for deeper theory-based understanding of social and organizational dynamics. In particular, it is argued that the richness of perspectives, focus and levels of analysis could offer insights to conceptualize, see and make sense of some of the challenges that are posed by a desire for promoting transition towards more sustainable ways of organizing our society.

The need for long-term stewardship for hazards is widespread and increasing. Many of the largest and most complex sites requiring stewardship are within the U.S. Department of Energy's nuclear weapons complex, though many “brownfields” and Superfund sites in the private sector have similar needs for long-term care. High cleanup costs and difficult-to-resolve technical challenges are the main reasons why such sites are not being cleaned up to support unrestricted use. EPA policy changes are now redirecting cleanup efforts toward waste isolation and containment-in-place rather than waste removal. This shift is not being matched by a corresponding shift in the conceptual and operational approach to remediation planning. The process logic of cleanup continues to be “single-pass” and linear, via sequential planning and implementation stages that aim to declare sites “cleaned up and closed” once the sought-after degree of waste isolation from the biotic environment is achieved. Instead an iterative and nonlinear process logic is required – one that directs cleanup toward the needs of effective stewardship of the remaining residual contamination rather than toward regulatory standards that support the selected future land use for the site. This redirection of cleanup logic shifts the focus in remediation planning to vulnerabilities and uncertainties associated with long-term stewardship rather than the degree of isolation of wastes from human populations and the environment achieved. Such a shift is needed in recognition that situations of restricted human use of still-contaminated sites are being created that remain vulnerable to failure given the length of time over which stewardship is required.

This study examined the effect of good stewardship on agency costs and firm performance. The panel data analysis with the Panel Corrected Standard Errors (PCSEs) estimator was employed to analyze the effect of good stewardship on agency cost and the impact of good stewardship on the performance of 37 South African firms from 2007 to 2016. The findings of this study reveal that good stewardship has a significant positive effect on agency costs as well as firm performance, implying that the promotion of good stewardship should be accompanied by suitable strategies to manage additional agency costs.

This study investigated the influence of ambiguous customer expectations and customer demandingness, which reflect hindrance and challenge demands, on the boundary spanning behaviors (BSBs) of frontline bank employees (FBEs) through person-job fit and work engagement. It also examined the moderating effect of customer stewardship between job demands and work engagement.

Data of 296 FBEs in the retail banking industry in the Republic of Korea were collected through an online survey and analyzed.

Ambiguous customer expectations acted as hindrance demands and negatively affected FBEs' psychological process. Additionally, customer demandingness positively affected FBEs' psychological process as challenge demands. Moreover, person-job fit and work engagement improved the BSBs of FBEs as a psychological motivation process. Lastly, customer stewardship buffered the negative influence of ambiguous customer expectations on work engagement while strengthening the positive influence of customer demandingness on work engagement.

This study contributes to the marketing literature by presenting customer-related characteristics influencing the BSBs of FBEs and exploring the psychological response processes. First, this study presents empirical evidence that ambiguous customer expectations and customer demandingness play the role of hindrance and challenge demands, respectively. Second, it confirms that customer-related characteristics affect the BSBs of FBEs through psychological processes. Finally, it enriches the authors' understanding of customer stewardship as a job resource by exploring the role of customer stewardship in moderating the relationship between different types of job demands and work engagement.

This research aims to examine some nudges for creating psychological ownership in order to reduce misbehaviors, consequently encouraging subsequent users to demonstrate stewardship behaviors.

This research examined the sentiment of tweets (Study 1) to explore user experience and conducted two experiments (Studies 2 and 3) to test the hypotheses.

The misbehavior of the previous user in relation to the subsequent user's stewardship behavior was moderated by nudges based on self-investment and local identity. Perceived responsibility mediated the relationship between misbehavior and stewardship behavior as a result of nudges.

The findings of this study provide a framework for the transition from misbehavior to stewardship behavior in PMVs.

That knowledge acquisition from external sources can play a pivotal role in product design is a well-known fact. However, knowledge acquisition need not play a pivotal role in every context; it is also documented to have a dark side (i.e. negative impacts). Specifically, given that product stewardship, by definition, calls on each party in the product life cycle – including suppliers – to share responsibility for the environmental impact of products, the purpose of this study is to answer the question “whether knowledge acquired from suppliers plays a beneficial role in the context of product stewardship?”

This study focuses on the effect of knowledge acquisition on product stewardship and its subsequent effect on environmental performance. Given that the effect of knowledge acquisition could be moderated by firm-specific and relational factors, this study also considers the moderating role of knowledge exploitation and supplier opportunism. Using primary data, the hypotheses are tested using two-stage hierarchical ordinary least squares regression models involving valid instruments.

Though extant research doubts that knowledge acquisition will always be beneficial, this study adheres to the tenets of knowledge-based view and hypothesize that knowledge acquisition is pivotal to product stewardship and its subsequent impact on environmental performance. But the results suggest an intriguing double-edged effect of knowledge acquisition; while its direct effect on product stewardship is nonsignificant, it seemed to have a significant positive moderating effect on the relationship between product stewardship and environmental performance. But whenever knowledge exploitation and supplier opportunism are maintained at ideal levels, this double-edged effect of knowledge acquisition is successfully negated.

While knowledge acquisition is key for new product design, its specific role in the product design that incorporates environmental considerations is still not clear. By proposing that knowledge acquisition could instead have a double-edged effect within the unique context of product stewardship, the study makes an invaluable contribution to the extant literature on knowledge management within supply chain relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the type of governance dominant within employee-owned companies established as an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOPs) and to ascertain if governance follows the agency or stewardship theory of governance.

A sequential mixed method (Quantitative/Qualitative) research design was used with a convenience sample of employee-owned companies who were members of The ESOP Association (TEA). The Stewardship Climate Scale (SCS) was used as the quantitative instrument and structured interviews were used as the qualitative instrument.

A majority (96%) of ESOPs participating in the study self-identified as stewardship governance, only 6 of the 154 companies (4%) self-identified as having agency governance.

There is a potential of self-report bias based on the use of convenience sampling which should be minimized based on the large number of participants. The study was not able to examine the relationship between stewardship and productivity.

This is the first large scale research study examining governance within employee-owned companies.