Does ownership decide whether stewardship works?
Clare Wood, founder of Ethosic, argues that stewardship only works when three separate acts of stewardship line up, and asks what the research says about the biggest hidden variable in whether they do: who owns the asset manager in the middle
I was at two different events, a few weeks apart, and the same question came up in both, unprompted.
At an Impact Investing day in Oxford, a session on alternative ownership structures opened by asking why the industry does things the way it has always done them, and what might change if it tried something else.[1] At the City Hive Investors ACT 2026, a panel of asset managers compared notes on what it actually feels like to work inside a parent-owned firm, a listed one, a private partnership, and how differently that shapes the day-to-day business of being a steward of other people's money.
There was no connection between the two events but both brought up ownership as the question that sits behind stewardship.
Stewardship is three acts, not one
The word "stewardship" gets used almost entirely to describe one thing: what an asset manager does when it votes company shares and engages with management. That is real and important work, but it is only the middle part of a longer chain.
There is the stewardship a company does for itself, in how it treats its employees, its suppliers, its customers and the communities it operates in. There is the stewardship an asset manager does on behalf of its clients, through voting and engagement and the decisions it takes in where to invest. And then there is the stewardship an investor does before any of that happens, in the decisions about where their capital goes and what they want from it.
Each of those three is a genuine act of stewardship in its own right. The magic happens when all three are pointing the same direction: a well stewarded company, held to account by an asset manager who takes that seriously, chosen by an investors who understood what they were asking for. When any one of the three is missing or half-hearted, the other two will struggle to compensate.
What the research says about ownership
The two events were onto something the research backs up. Willis Towers Watson's Thinking Ahead Institute, in its long-running study of culture in investment organisations, treats ownership as a genuine determinant of culture rather than a footnote to it: asset owners are typically "profit-for-member" entities, asset managers typically "profit-for-shareholder" ones, and that difference shapes the explicit and implicit incentives each firm's people respond to.[2] The Institute's own research points to a secular drift among asset managers toward more self-centred values under commercial and short-term performance pressure, precisely because their ownership model rewards it.
That would suggest ownership is closer to destiny than choice. But a separate strand of academic research shows that it needn’t be. A 2022 study by Feldermann and Hiebl, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Management, found that formal equity is not the only route to stewardship behaviour.[3] Employees and managers who develop a strong psychological sense of ownership, the feeling that a firm is genuinely theirs to look after, behave like stewards even without holding a single share. For firms that cannot restructure their formal ownership, that finding is important because it means the culture inside the building can do work that the ownership structure alone cannot.
Culture can compensate, but the risk never fully goes away
The same study also tested what happens when that psychological ownership exists alongside a "self-serving agency culture", one where leaders visibly use their position to serve their own interests. For managers with only a modest sense of ownership, a self-serving culture around them significantly weakened their stewardship behaviour. But for managers with a genuinely strong sense of ownership, the effect of that surrounding culture largely disappeared. In other words, a sufficiently strong culture of stewardship can override the drag of a weaker ownership structure, at least for the people who have internalised it.
However, the risk never fully goes away. The Thinking Ahead Institute makes the point that strong culture is "mean reverting", meaning it drifts back toward a weaker, more self-interested state without continuous, deliberate leadership effort to hold it in place.[4] That means a conscious and continuous focus on culture is vital for effective stewardship.
The ownership mentality
What brings those studies together with the three levels of stewardship? It’s the idea of an ownership mentality, and that is tied up with investment timeframes. If end investors, portfolio managers and company management are thinking about the long-term, they are more likely to act as owners and more likely to have a culture that promotes stewardship. Both events noted that ownership mattes, but it’s not the whole story. The research suggests they were right on both counts.
References:
Yoak – YOAK
Thinking Ahead Institute – The impact of culture on institutional investors - 2019
Feldermann and Hiebl – Psychological ownership and stewardship behavior: The moderating role of agency culture - 2022
Thinking Ahead Institute – The impact of culture on institutional investors – 2019