Journal of Family Business Strategy最新文献

The concept of legacy exists at the core of family business research, yet as a construct, the nature of what legacy is and why and how legacy matters across generations has been poorly understood (Hammond, Pearson, & Holt, 2016). This lack of conceptual clarity has limited legacy research in the domain of family business. In this article, we provide a comprehensive definition of legacy that can be used to draw connections across existing legacy research and open new avenues of inquiry critical to understanding both family firms and legacy itself.

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.

Research on emotions is gaining momentum in the family business literature. However, the literature remains unclear on the psychological foundations of how managing one’s emotions can contribute to socioemotional wealth goals in a family business. We contribute to the study on emotions in the family business literature by linking the ‘Socioemotional Wealth’ (hereafter ‘SEW’) perspective with the ‘Emotional Labor’ concept to elaborate on the microfoundations of SEW. Following an interpretive qualitative methodology, abductive data analysis was conducted using thematic analysis techniques with over fifteen hours of interview material collected from family business owners/members. Results indicated that family members’ perception of SEW objectives and their emotional labor are linked and that this relationship has utility in the preservation of SEW. We also found that, when exercised inappropriately, latitude in emotional displays, also known as ‘display latitude’, could potentially deplete SEW. Our findings extend the family business literature on emotion management and contribute to our understanding of the emotions-related mechanisms associated with SEW preservation and depletion in family firms. Our results have practical implications for family businesses regarding the need for family members to strike a balance between emotional labor and display latitude for the sake of preserving SEW.

To further our understanding of family influence in family businesses, this study introduces the Perceived Family Influence Scale (PFIS). Departing from existing owner-centric methodologies, the PFIS uses social constructivism theory to capture family influence from the perspective of non-family employees, a frequently neglected but integral stakeholder group within the family firm ecosystem. Following a rigorous multistep development process involving 600 non-family employees, we validate the PFIS and identify three core sub-dimensions of perceived family influence: culture, organizational decision-making, and image. We also demonstrate the practical applicability of the PFIS by examining the link between perceived family influence and non-family employee job satisfaction. Grounded in social constructivism, the PFIS is a reliable instrument that allows for the collection of more unbiased and holistic data on family influence, thereby refining our understanding of family firms and advancing the family business research field.

Qualitative research can offer meaningful insights into the complexities of family businesses and inspire and inform theory development in family business as well as other fields. Unlike in quantitative approaches, there are no general standards for conducting and reporting qualitative research. In lieu of such standards, following templates in previously published papers has become a popular means of establishing a certain level of standardization in qualitative research. However, recent discussions about the detriments of mindless template use have highlighted the dangers of inappropriate standardization for research quality of qualitative research. This article raises awareness of the challenges and inherent risks of template prescriptions in qualitative family business research and proposes alternative avenues going forward. Scholars, as well as journal editors and reviewers, may take inspiration and orientation from these alternatives to harness the diversity and core strengths of qualitative family business research without enforcing generalized standards.

When it comes to organizational conflict in (small) family businesses, managers’ personality has received little attention. We investigated the relationship between managers’ personality traits (Big Five) and their perceptions of task conflict and relationship conflict in two types of firms (family vs. non-family business). We collected data from 103 managers in small firms (56 family firms and 47 non-family firms) in Ecuador. Our findings show that family firms have less relationship conflict compared to non-family firms. Managers’ personality seems to play a key role in perceiving conflicts. Particularly, managers’ openness and extraversion are related to less perceived conflict. Introverted managers in non-family businesses perceive more relationship conflict than those in family businesses. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Family firms are claimed to be long-term oriented and aim at preserving their non-financial business family objectives, which is also reflected in their employment behavior. While family firms’ behavioral and strategic responses to declining performance have received some academic attention, studies acknowledging family firm generational stage are rarer. In this article, we assess the “employment smoothing” hypothesis, according to which both first- and later-generation family firms restrain from laying off their employees despite financial pressure. We use statistical data from over 4000 Finnish companies to examine the differences in employment behavior between family and non-family SMEs and address the family firm’s generational stage. By differentiating between various phases of the financial crisis that peaked during 2008–2009, we explore several dimensions of employment variability, such as changes in the number of employees, within-firm time variation, and standard deviation in employment to test our hypothesis. We find that first-generation family firms are agile—they introduce changes swiftly by cutting their personnel at the start of financial pressure and restrain from doing so during later years. On the other hand, later-generation family businesses are more stable in their employment behavior than first-generation family businesses and non-family businesses—they introduce employment changes only after their profitability has remained at a lower level for a prolonged period following the start of the crisis.

Challenging the established notion that women at the top are consistently risk averse, this study combines insights from social identity and socioemotional wealth (SEW) perspectives to propose a novel view of risk preferences by women and men CEOs in family businesses. It reframes risk preferences as behavioral responses by gender and family (managerial) role expectations relative to social aspirations. An empirical test of Italian firms provides support for the hypothesized effects. For firms above social aspirations, women family CEOs take more risk as performance declines than their men family counterparts; this gap in risk preferences attenuates for men/women nonfamily CEOs. For firms below social aspirations, these effects are reversed. This study contributes to research on gender identity and risk-taking in family firms by showing that women and men do not always behave according to gender stereotypes. Rather, due to malleability of gender identity, they enact differing risk behaviors across contexts. In addition, it advances SEW theory by unpacking the effects of distinct SEW dimensions on firm risk by gender identity.

The purpose of this special issue is to advance the ongoing dialogue on gender diversity in family businesses and, more generally, encourage further research on individual distinctions to foster an inclusive milieu leading to greater equity, innovation, and organizational resilience. The studies in this special issue exemplify various aspects of gender diversity in family business, offering innovative perspectives to examine gender roles and representation within family businesses. Building on these articles, we offer a perspective that combines feminist theories with a social identity theory approach, going beyond the Business Case for gender equality and incorporating an emphasis on gender and power dynamics and identities. We conclude by proposing several future research directions to advance gender diversity studies in family business context.