HOUSTON — Aubrey K. McClendon built Chesapeake Energy into the nation’s second-largest producer of natural gas through a combination of debt, foresight, luck and sheer bravado.


Now both he and the company have been forced to add humility to the mix.


After two weeks of mounting shareholder criticism about Mr. McClendon’s unusual compensation plan, Chesapeake announced on Tuesday that it would replace him as chairman and prematurely end an arrangement that granted him the right to buy a 2.5 percent stake in every well the company drilled.


Hours later, the company reported disappointing first-quarter earnings and said it would further scale back its gas drilling plans amid a continued glut that Chesapeake’s own aggressive expansion helped create.


Mr. McClendon will remain chief executive of Chesapeake, which is based in Oklahoma City, but the board said it would seek to appoint a nonexecutive chairman with no ties to the company, a separation of power urged by many shareholders. And his right to buy into Chesapeake’s wells, known as the Founder Well Participation Program, will be terminated on June 30, 2014 — 18 months ahead of schedule and without any compensation to him for giving up the privilege.


“For him, it’s got to be at least a slap in the face because he is losing some of his control,” said Philip H. Weiss, an analyst with Argus Research, who questioned why the compensation arrangement wasn’t ending sooner.


Mr. McClendon, who is the most public face of the shale gas drilling boom and a vocal proponent for switching the country’s electricity production from coal to gas, is a co-founder of Chesapeake and the only chief it has ever had. Under his 24 years of stewardship, Chesapeake acquired drilling rights on more than 15 million acres around the country — roughly equivalent to the size of West Virginia — and drilled tens of thousands of wells. (Exxon Mobil is the No. 1 producer.)


But as details of Mr. McClendon’s compensation structure trickled out in news reports over the last two weeks, shareholders and analysts made it clear to the board that the setup, which had been in place for many years, was no longer acceptable. In particular, investors were uncomfortable with the potential conflicts posed by his vast borrowing from investment firms that did business with Chesapeake — an amount the company disclosed at $846 million — to finance his share of drilling expenses.


In a sign of the shareholder pressure, Chesapeake included a statement from Southeastern Asset Management, an activist investment firm in Memphis that is its biggest investor, in announcing the changes.


“We are pleased that the board listened to our input and believe it has made the right decision by ending the F.W.P.P. early and seeking an independent chairman,” O. Mason Hawkins, Southeastern’s chairman and chief, said in the statement. “Aubrey was right to recognize that these actions are in the best interests of the company and its shareholders.”


Southeastern had a 17 percent stake in the company at the end of last year and backed the appointment of Louis A. Simpson, a former chief executive of Geico, as a director.


The biggest share of Mr. McClendon’s loans came from EIG Global Energy Partners, which has also invested in Chesapeake wells. Other lenders included Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Critics of Mr. McClendon have said that the crisscrossing relationships gave at least the appearance of conflicts of interest since he could conduct Chesapeake business with those firms on preferential terms in exchange for favored treatment on his personal loans.


The Securities and Exchange Commission has begun an informal investigation, and the company disclosed Monday that the Internal Revenue Service was reviewing the compensation plan.


Negotiations between Chesapeake’s board and Mr. McClendon began last Thursday, according to people briefed on the matter. Company directors were afraid of arousing further shareholder ire. Yet they also sought to keep him from departing.


In the end, the board agreed to keep the program until mid-2014, allowing Mr. McClendon to buy stakes in new shale oil and gas fields in Ohio, Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle that Chesapeake plans to drill over the next year that most experts say they believe will be lucrative.