Inside the Head of an Insider : Motivation for those who are Hired to Motivate

Abstract: The purpose of this thesis is to increase the understanding of how senior management executives experience insider ownership. An additional aim is to investigate if there is a difference of the experiences of senior management executives with a Swedish cultural background in comparison to the experiences of senior management executives with other cultural backgrounds, with regards to insider ownership. By distribution of a questionnaire, partly through telephone interviews and in part via email, empirical primary data is gathered. The empirical findings indicate that insider ownership has a broad area of use and that senior management executives experience insider ownership as a source of motivation. Further, the study indicates that insider ownership is experienced as a motivational source regardless of cultural background since the study sees tendencies of that personal characteristics outweigh the cultural permeation. The findings of this study imply tendencies that show many different positive effects of insider ownership. For example, insider ownership could be a motivational source, a governance tool for creating trust among employees and other interlinked stakeholders. This could in turn mean that insider ownership contributes to a more cooperative working environment. Also, insider ownership has been portrayed as a possible catalyst for increased motivation. Thus, insider ownership could be a source for increased individual performance, and thus, company performance. Additionally, one of the major findings of this study is the tendencies that could prove to be of interest for future research, for example; that the feeling of fear might be superior to the feeling of greed