10.5465/AMBPP.2013.76 FAMILY FIRM CEO SHAPING FIRM-LEVEL ENTREPRENEURIAL ORIENTATION: THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS AS MEDIATOR JELLE SCHEPERS Hasselt University Agoralaan – Building D – 3590 Diepenbeek (Belgium) WIM VOORDECKERS Hasselt University, Belgium TENSIE STEIJVERS Hasselt University, Belgium EDDY LAVEREN University of Antwerp, Belgium INTRODUCTION Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) can be a critical factor in a firm’s profitability and growth (e.g.Lumpkin & Dess, 1996; Rauch, Wiklund, Lumpkin, & Frese, 2009). While most EO research aims at finding such performance consequences, a significant stream of research has revealed a number of antecedent variables where the firm’s CEO seems to play an important role in shaping firm-level EO (e.g. Miller & Le Breton-Miller, 2011; Poon, Ainuddin, & Junit, 2006; Simsek, Heavey, & Veiga, 2010). CEO’s identity (Miller & Le Breton-Miller, 2011) and his personal characteristics (Poon et al., 2006; Simsek et al., 2010) are found to influence a firm’s EO. Although these studies have highly contributed to the literature and showed how individual-level variables, like CEO core self-evaluation or locus of control, can affect firm- level outcomes, some caution is needed here. More specific, by simply focusing on the CEO as major antecedent of firm-level EO, researchers tend to ignore an important step in the decision process of a firm. Namely, CEOs are responsible for the day to day management and can come up with the initiation of new initiatives and ideas, which affects the firm’s EO, but it is the board of directors that has to ratify and monitor these decisions (Fama & Jensen, 1983). Consequently, board activities are expected to be important intervening or mediating variables that need to be examined to understand the relationship between CEO characteristics and EO. The current paper shows that CEOs in private family firms will use their power to guide board behavior in line with their personal priorities. Especially in a family business context, CEOs tend to have the power to affect organizational outcomes (Fiegener, Brown, Dreux IV, & Dennis Jr, 2000), like EO, but they will exercise their power through the board of directors (Shen, 2003). In particular, CEOs can exert their power to influence board behavior in accordance with their personal preferences (e.g. Zahra & Pearce, 1989). Namely, powerful CEOs are highly involved in director selection (Alderfer, 1986), which makes the board of directors a useful tool for management interests (Herman, 1981; Zajac & Westphal, 1996). Hence, there is an evident need to understand how CEOs can shape their firm’s EO by influencing their board of directors. This article intends to fill this void by investigating the role family firm CEOs, power mechanisms and board behavior play in the shaping of EO. Current research distinguishes