When Entrepreneurship meets Accounting: (Non-) Financial Information Exchange Between Venture Capital Investors, Business Angels, Incubators, Accelerators, and Start-ups

Organizational citizenship behavior: understanding interaction effects of psychological ownership and agency systems

“…Agency theory, a dominant paradigm in management theorizing, has been applied extensively across various research disciplines, such as organizational behavior (e.g., Larkin et al 2012;Buchko 1993), strategic management (e.g., Shi et al 2016;Perryman and Combs 2012), family business (e.g., Eddleston et al 2018;Madison et al 2017), and entrepreneurship (e.g., Bratfisch et al 2023). It examines the relationship between principals (e.g., owners) and agents (e.g., employees), whereby the principal engages the agent to perform certain services and to make decisions on the principal's behalf (Jensen and Meckling 1976;Davis et al 1997).…”

“…Although these theories focus on similar outcomes (i.e., how to induce employee behaviors aligned with organizational goals), their underlying mechanisms are different. For the most part, agency theory emphasizes a formal (hard) approach centered on organizational interventions that trigger extrinsic motivation (e.g., Bratfisch et al 2023). In contrast, psychological ownership is geared toward an informal (soft) perspective that stimulates employees' intrinsic motivation to act in the organization's best interest (e.g., Sieger et al 2013).…”

“…Instead, attention should be paid to more fine-grained characteristics of extrinsic motivators, such as whether they are implemented through formal or informal organizational procedures. Second, we contribute to agency theory (Eisenhardt 1989;Jensen and Meckling 1976) by moving beyond past research's common emphasis on how governance mechanisms enhance organizational and financial performance under the assumption of minimizing employees' negative, calculative, and self-serving behaviors (Bratfisch et al 2023;Flammer et al 2019;Keum 2021;Welbourne et al 1995). Rather, in this study, we literally examine how governance mechanisms induce and impact employees' cognitive-affective states and behaviors, not in terms of minimizing negative behaviors (past research common assumption) but instead regarding employees' positive and desirable cognitive-affective states and behavioral outcomes.…”