CEOs Driving Decision Making Toward Higher Performance: Strategic Micro-foundations of Small-Sized Family Firms

Chief executive officers (CEOs) have a substantial influence on the decision-making processes of the top management team (TMT) and the performance of the firm in general, and this influence is particularly important in small-sized family firms. By integrating research on CEO qualities and the CEO-TMT interface to explain how they interact in ways that drive firm performance, we provide a first attempt to highlight the importance of CEO capacity to implement decisions that were made following a comprehensive process (i.e., strategic decision comprehensiveness, SDC) for the performance of small-sized family firms. In so doing, we provide a micro-foundation lens and also direct research attention to decision implementation, a key issue in the field of strategic management, which unfortunately has relatively been overlooked in the extant literature. Results of multisource survey data collected from CEOs and TMT members of 131 small-sized family firms indicate a positive interaction effect between CEO implementation capacity, the TMT SDC, and the performance of small-sized family firms.