Journal of Family Business Strategy最新文献

This paper investigates whether and to what extent strategy disclosure influences the cost of capital, comparing family and non-family firms and considering the proportion of women directors. We theorize that voluntary strategy disclosure may be either beneficial or detrimental depending on the perceptions by financial stakeholders about the role of governance attributes. These stakeholders might, indeed, assess strategy disclosure differently based on their stereotyped view of the family firm status and women’s involvement on the board of directors. By referring to a sample of 93 listed Italian small and medium-sized enterprises, we show that, unlike with their non-family counterparts, strategy disclosure increases the cost of capital for family firms. However, an increasing proportion of women directors softens this negative effect. Moreover, when a critical mass of women directors is appointed to the board, the strategy disclosure becomes beneficial for family firms too. We consequently offer a threefold contribution to the literature on gender diversity, family business and corporate voluntary disclosure.

The initial work on family firm diversity research argued that family influence negatively moderates the board diversity–financial firm performance relationship, whereas more recent empirical evidence has suggested the opposite. Drawing on upper echelons theory, we investigate national culture (i.e., the degree of masculinity in the country of the firm) as a contingency factor influencing how tenure and gender board diversity translate into superior or inferior financial performance in family and non-family firms. Our analyses of 4192 firm-year observations of publicly listed European firms support most of our hypotheses. Our results show that the positive direct financial performance effects of tenure diversity are weakened in family firms, suggesting that the larger differences in values, goals, experiences, and power among family and non-family board members may suppress the benefits of cognitive variety. Furthermore, our results support that the degree of masculinity is an important factor moderating the diversity-family firm-financial firm performance relationship for gender and tenure diversity. We thereby advance diversity research in family firms to explain under what conditions positive or negative diversity effects prevail by introducing national culture as a novel contingency factor that may help to reconcile prior conflicting findings.

The behavioral agency model predicts that family firms underinvest in R&D to preserve socioemotional wealth. In transition economies, family firms suffer from institution voids, so political embeddedness helps them do business. In a mixed gamble analysis of publicly listed firms in China, we find that politically embedded family firms are more likely to invest in R&D than those that are not politically embedded. However, this effect is weaker when the firms are in more-competitive industries or regions with higher speed of pro-market reforms. Hence, in regions with higher pro-market reforms speed or in more-competitive industries of China, family firms should be aware that potential financial and SEW gains derived from R&D investment are less dependent on the government and that political embeddedness does not always confer advantages. Family firms need to be strategic in response to institutional changes when implementing nonmarket strategies.

Despite the efforts to contextualize human resource management to family firms, scientific literature addressing this study domain suffers from limited systematization. The article arranges an integrative framework to make sense of the challenges faced by family firms in designing and implementing human resource management practices. Bibliographic coupling was run on an intellectual core of 69 papers to illuminate dominant research streams. Besides, co-citation was executed to determine the conceptual roots nurturing recent scholarly advancements. A dance between formality and informality of human resource management practices characterizes extant research, calling for developments to understand how family firms can deal with it.

In their groundbreaking study of family business leader succession, Sonnenfeld and Spence (1989) found that the heroic self-concept, consisting of heroic stature and heroic mission, prevents the incumbent patriarch from letting go (retiring, stepping aside). For all the impact that their study has had on succession scholarship, we assert that they failed to consider female family business leaders. We re-examine their findings, through a generalizability replication with extensions grounded in recent scholarship. We thereby extend the original study and broaden its reach, stressing the need for exploration of letting go by female leaders in family businesses. When introducing gender in the heroic self-concept/letting go relationship, we find that heroic mission and heroic stature are each significant to males, but not females, suggesting a gendered difference in letting go. Our analysis confirms the original study’s findings for male leaders and we expose limits to the generalizability of their work to female leaders.

Corruption is an important social and economic problem globally, and family firms are an important source of such corruption that we know too little about. By leveraging insights from the literature on family priorities, governance, and institutional environments, we develop a multi-level model highlighting why some family firms are prone to exhibit corruption in specific contexts. We focus on businesses where close connections between firm and family cause the priorities of the one to affect the other. There, family loyalties, conflicts, ethics, and social aspirations can enhance the willingness to engage in corrupt behavior. Private ownership and secrecy facilitate that behavior, as do tempting contexts with few institutional constraints. We provide examples and propositions for further research.

Attracting business college graduates is a major challenge for the growth and transgenerational success of family firms. Moreover, the institutional context of countries is critical in explaining family firms’ potential advantages and/or disadvantages in attracting nonfamily talent. This study aims to elucidate how communicating firm ownership (family vs. nonfamily), firm size (large vs. small), and type of job offered (professional vs. nonprofessional) influences the perceptions and attitudes of Latin American business graduates toward working in such firms. In an experimental study that uses job advertisement stimuli, we found that communicating family ownership positively influences career development’s perceptions of firm prestige. Large (vs. small) firm size also has a positive influence on job seekers’ perceptions of firms. Importantly, both firm prestige and career development positively influence the attraction of working in family firms. In this paper, we discuss the differences in the results among countries and professional vs. nonprofessional job positions advertised. The results have several implications for family firm owners and managers.

Organizational ambidexterity —the ability to simultaneously engage in exploration and exploitation— is an important characteristic of firms that are interested in pursuing continuity. One of the prevalent goals of family firms is continuity. Thus, there is great interest in understanding ambidexterity and the factors that promote this behavior within family firms. Although there is some research that has explored this topic, there is a limited understanding regarding which family factors drive ambidexterity, how they influence it, and the role of the context in this process. We conducted a study with 21 Latin American family firms to better understand the family factors that play a role in the strategic orientation towards ambidexterity of family firms and the conditions under which these family factors matter. Our findings indicate that family maturity and family social responsibility are two family factors that drive the ambidextrous orientation of family firms when they help the family business develop dynamic capabilities. Additionally, the institutional context also influences how business families implement and use these capabilities to enhance their ambidextrous orientations. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and future research.

This paper examines the role of women in family business. Prior studies suggest that in Latin America the contribution of women in family business remains largely hidden, often relegated to a supportive role. Drawing on an entrepreneurial stewardship perspective, this study challenges that perception, paying close attention to the contribution of women to family business continuity. This study relies on a multiple case study design, and uses a critical approach to examine family businesses in rural areas of Honduras. We find that gendered norms are fluid, as women’s roles are multi-faceted being simultaneously influenced by household and family business logics. Thus, the contribution of women emerges specifically in terms of embracing a stewarding role, nurturing resilience, and shaping family and business networks. What our findings point to is that the contribution of women to the continuity of family businesses in Latin America, previously perceived as invisible and/or disguised, is enacted through a formal and visible managerial role, as well as an informal and discreet stewarding role. Implications for theory and practice, as well as opportunities for future research, are offered.

This editorial introduces the special issue on “Family Business in Latin America”. We argue that the cultural context plays an important role as a source of heterogeneity of family firms. Thus, in this introductory piece, we describe the Latin American cultural context and explain how and why it creates a unique environment that requires family firms to behave differently. We build on past research as well as on the four articles published in this special issue. The goal is to stimulate further research on Latin American family firms, what makes them unique, and what we can learn from this context that may be useful in other cultural environments.