Gravity Payments boss Dan Price will be a tough act to follow for the business world’s top CEOs, who are unlikely to slash their own six- and seven-figure salaries to pay their employees more.

Price set the bar impossibly high this week when he announced he would give up most of his $1-million salary to raise his employees’ salaries to at least $70,000 a year. Price said he will dip into the profits at his privately-owned credit card payment company to cover the added expenses, all in an effort to make the lives of his 120 employees happier.

Educator Chris MacDonald, from the Ted Rogers School of Business Management, said Price is doing a “wonderful thing,” but his actions probably will not inspire the CEOs of larger companies to follow suit.

“It really matters that Gravity is a private company,” MacDonald told CTV’s Canada AM on Thursday.

He pointed out that Gravity Payments has no board of directors or shareholders to answer to, so Price and his brother/business partner are not bound by the same constraints that higher-paid CEOs must deal with.

“He’s free to give away the wealth as he wishes,” MacDonald said. “Mr. Price has clearly done well in life and he wants to give back and he’s supporting the employees that have been loyal to him.”

That’s a luxury most CEOs don’t share, MacDonald said. CEOs at top-traded public companies like Exxon Mobil, General Electric or Google must answer to shareholders and a board of directors, meaning they are not free to cut their salaries or divvy up profits among their employees.

“A board of directors with a sworn obligation to the company as a whole … would be very hesitant to do this kind of thing,” MacDonald said.

Even if a CEO chose to give away his salary, MacDonald says that money would be spread thin at a large company with many employees.

“If your CEO makes $10 million, if you’ve got 500,000 employees, that doesn’t go very far when you spread it around,” MacDonald said.

He added reducing the pay for a top CEO position would also make it harder for big companies to “attract top talent” to that position and other roles in the company.

However, he does applaud Price for his bold move. He just hopes Price and Gravity Payments can sustain the added expenses and stay afloat.

“If you’re paying these extra salaries directly out of profits, you have to be pretty confident that those profits are going to stay around,” he said. “It’s going to be awfully hard to claw back that money if profits were to go down.”

MacDonald added that Price would likely have difficulty taking the company public with his new salary structure in place.

But that doesn’t mean all this is a one-off. MacDonald pointed out that CEOs at other privately-owned companies are free to follow Price’s example.

He also said there’s a precedent for rich executives following the example of their charitable peers. For instance, when Microsoft founder Bill Gates announced he would give away most of his fortune, Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett soon followed up with a similar pledge.

Several billionaires have now committed to the “Giving Pledge,” a philanthropic pact that calls for pledgers to use the majority of their wealth for charitable causes.

MacDonald says Price’s charitable actions could catch on in a similar way among CEOs at private companies.

“With this sort of bold, charitable move, seeing it happen once can be the thing that makes it appear possible that it could happen again,” he said.