Journal of Family Business Strategy最新文献

Continuity and change are typically considered as two antithetical concepts, and their coexistence would seem paradoxical. The dilemma for family businesses undergoing inter-generational transition is how to balance these two paradoxical factors - i.e., continuity and change, especially as leadership transitions from senior generations endowed with a bundle of rituals to junior ones. A qualitative research methodology with an abductive analysis approach was applied. Ten successful and mature family-owned businesses operating in Lebanon were contacted and agreed to participate in the study. Interviews with senior and junior generations were conducted. Through adopting a family business imprinting perspective, the study theorized how the continuing legacy of senior generations shaped different approaches to change and continuity depending on the content imprinted on the junior generations. The unique contribution of this paper lies in identifying how family businesses resolve this paradox. This paper found that they do this through four distinct strategies - protecting the inheritance, keeping the spirit, renovating the rituals, and nurturing memories.

This study employs an interpretive grounded theory approach to explore how family contexts shape the early-stage career development of next-generation family business members (next-gens) in succession and non-succession careers. Career theories suggest that early-stage career development is an outcome of individual–context interaction. However, the current literature on careers in a family business offers limited insights into the enabling and constraining contexts within the family, such as the family social system, marriage, traditions, and cultural environment. In line with the systems theory framework of career development, our findings demonstrate that individual and family contextual interactions not only shape the careers of next-gens but also drive variations in succession and non-succession careers. Our study contributes to the literature by constructing an early-stage career development model that helps to explain the importance of marriage and family traditions in the early-stage career development of next-gen family business members.

This study seeks to extend the classic socio-emotional and stewardship perspective on family CEOs with a complementary rational-economic perspective on their agentic behavior. To this end, using a sample of 103 top executives of U.S. family firms, we investigate the relationship between continuance commitment of family CEOs and their perceptions of family cohesion and discuss how this relationship is moderated by firm performance. Integrating insights from research on organizational behavior into the family business literature, we discuss how key decision makers in the family business context engage in rational cost-benefit analyses regarding their own personal investments in the firm. Our findings suggest that the continuance commitment of family CEOs interacts with performance to enhance perceptions of family cohesion.

Many businesses opt to expand internationally. The reasons for international expansion have been broadly addressed in existing literature and typically reflect economic or strategic objectives. However, a myriad of family objectives must also be considered in the case of family businesses. This paper aims to determine the motivations for family business internationalisation and their influence on international commitment in the context of family involvement. This work compares the significance of economic goals with the relevance of non-economic goals (e.g., strategic and family goals) to understand which contributes the most to a firm’s international success and growth. Focusing on international Spanish wine and olive oil businesses with various levels of family involvement, our results reveal that as family involvement increases, economic motivations become less important in justifying international strategy. Strategic and family motivations become more important in this context. We further conclude that family motivations contribute the most to international success among the three types of business motivations (economic, strategic, and family).

The question of whether family firms have a higher or lower labor productivity than nonfamily firms has led to a stream of inconsistent evidence. We address this polarized debate by arguing that the idiosyncratic workforce characteristics combined with the dual (socioemotional versus financial) wealth concerns of family firms may differ across the labor productivity distribution, which has a varying impact on the labor productivity differences of family firms versus nonfamily firms. Therefore, we use the method of unconditional quantile regression in our empirical testing on a rich data set containing firm-level data from a national survey of nearly 6,400 Chilean businesses, which allows us to account for the heterogeneous behavior of family firms throughout the entire labor productivity distribution rather than to focus on the difference in mean productivities merely. In line with our theoretical arguments, we find that family ownership generates a productivity advantage for firms located in the lower tail of the labor productivity distribution, whereas it exhibits a negative effect on labor productivity in the upper tail compared to their nonfamily counterparts. Our findings are robust to potential endogeneity of family ownership and offer a reconciling perspective on the contrasting labor-related agency and stewardship arguments dominating the labor productivity debate in family firms so far by showing which argument dominates depending on where the firm is located on the labor productivity distribution.

Nonfamily employees’ identification with the family firm is of importance as higher levels of identification are related to organizationally desired outcomes. However, nonfamily employees may display lower levels of identification when they perceive greater distance to the business and to the family or become demotivated by preferential treatment of family members. In this study, factors related to nonfamily employees’ organizational identification were investigated, thereby taking a leader-centered perspective. Drawing upon social identity theory, we assume that nonfamily leaders are more influential regarding nonfamily employees’ identification with the business and the family via strengthening identification with the team. We test our predictions across a two-wave study of 325 nonfamily employees of different family businesses. Interestingly, we find support that nonfamily leaders affect nonfamily employees’ identification with the family business and the owning family even more strongly than family leaders do. This effect, however, only occurs for nonfamily leaders operating within a high stewardship climate. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Over the past decades the field of family business has witnessed a surge in publications and experienced meaningful changes that have served to increase its legitimacy and establish the field as an independent area of academic inquiry. Along with these advancements, scholars have called for experimental research designs that can reveal the influence of individual-level, microfoundational phenomena underlying macro-level family business phenomena. Given the challenge of conducting such studies, the event-sampling method with experimental design (ESME) approach is highlighted as a new opportunity for family business scholars to further enrich their methodological toolbox. Fundamentally, the ESME approach is a longitudinal, repeated-sampling method with experimental design that provides researchers with the opportunity to investigate the effects of various micro-level phenomena within the family business. By facilitating the incorporation of familial variables and processual elements in family business research, the ESME approach can account for the longitudinal and dynamic interplay of family and family business phenomena. Overall, ESME is a method with the potential to help researchers answer many of the “how” questions that remain unanswered in the field of family business. A description of ESME is offered, relevant challenges and opportunities in family business research are identified, and best practices for ESME are shared to support the work of family business scholars.

Despite clear evidence that emotions, both individual- and group-level, matter in shaping family business processes and outcomes, there is a dearth of research on the importance of shared leadership of emotions, especially in the context of family business. Consequently, we seek to expand shared leadership theory to incorporate various aspects of emotions in the family business milieu. We introduce a generalized process model of shared leadership in family firms, then provide a brief overview of emotions. Next, operating within the larger theoretical domain of group emotion, we introduce and work toward developing a theory of shared emotional leadership in and of family business, including representative antecedents and outcomes. We subsequently lay out a research agenda to stimulate future theoretical and empirical work in the general ken.

This study challenges the current and dominant notion that psychological ownership is static by exploring its dynamic nature. It addresses how individual family business owners express their psychological ownership and how psychological ownership is impacted over time. Based on a longitudinal and qualitative study during a real-time exit, we conclude that family business owners assign meanings to their psychological ownership that are individual, multifold, enduring and volatile. Furthermore, we conclude that the dynamics of psychological ownership imply that it varies in meanings, among individuals, and in presence and duration of meanings. We also conclude that it is influenced by contextual circumstances, and that it is possible to liberate oneself cognitively and emotionally from psychological ownership.

Extant literature suggests that family firms, due to their desire to retain family control, have a lower propensity to diversify than non-family firms. Contrarily, family business groups (FBGs), especially Asian FBGs, are widely diversified. It was anticipated that FBGs would become more focused during reforms in developing economies. However, these FBGs did not only maintain their diversified portfolio of businesses but also enter newly deregulated sectors during reforms. This paper draws insights from transaction cost theory and knowledge governance literature to investigate this paradox. This paper argues that the family-based governance mechanisms of FBGs can efficiently manage their diversified portfolio by avoiding the “negatives” associated with market-based exchanges and creating “positives” by efficient knowledge sharing among affiliates. Thus, diversification strategies allowed Indian FBGs to create value and preserve the socioemotional and psychic wealth that comes from owning various businesses.