Ownership Changes as a Sign of Polish Holdings’ Response to the Economic Crisis

In research on enterprises’ crises scientists rarely focus on examining the relations between the signs of a crisis and ownership changes. The presented research focuses on the changes of the Polish holdings’ ownership structures, changes in their management and supervisory bodies related to the signs of crisis and some synthetic measures of activity. The research proves that the analysed enterprises did not make any radical changes in their ownership structure during the crisis. Statistically significant relations were simultaneously identified, which indicate that changes concerning the majority owner positively affect the way the holdings cope with the crisis. During the 2008–2013 economic crisis the owners of the examined holdings used their ownership rights to introduce changes in the governing bodies, whereby the changes in the management boards (the board composition and the chairman position) were introduced slightly more commonly than the changes in the supervisory boards. Changes of the chairman of the management board or supervisory board were not statistically related to the measures of the competitive position analysed in the research.