Journal of Family Business Strategy最新文献

The study purpose is to understand the nature and functioning of workplace identity verification of nonfamily employees in family firms as it affects financial and innovation performance of the family firm under the umbrella of Place Identity Theory. Creating a productive employee workplace environment involves verifying elements of a workplace identity meaning set composed of firm identification, firm loyalty, and decision making participation. QCA provides combinations of those workplace identity elements that create the greatest potential for financial and innovation performance. Interactional combinations of firm identification, firm loyalty, and decision making participation of family firm nonfamily employees creating the greatest potential for financial and innovation performance vary by firm age and CEO duality. Complementarity between SEM and QCA demonstrates the benefits of using a mainstream quantitative analysis method with the benefits of an emerging qualitative analysis method, thus, expanding Place Identity Theory's descriptive, predictive, and explanatory power.

This special issue contributes to the literature on entrepreneurship in family firms by leveraging the family embeddedness perspective. In doing so, the papers of the special issue bridge entrepreneurship at firm level with analyses at the individual and the enterprising family levels. Starting from and extending such contributions, in this introductory article we offer a “multilevel” embeddedness perspective on entrepreneurship in family firms. We do so first by considering that, in family firms, each individual's cognition ultimately depends on whether they belong to the enterprising family, and whether and how they are active in the family business. Second, we advance that individual entrepreneurial orientation is a key cognitive factor resulting from the multilevel embeddedness and bridging it with entrepreneurship at firm level. We derive theoretical implications for entrepreneurship in family business and highlight avenues for future research.

This study sheds light on the intrapreneurial motivation of non-family employees in family firms. Although family involvement is known to enhance workforce motivation to contribute innovative ideas toward the firm’s improvement, what motivates non-family employees in family firms and the role the enterprising family plays therein remain underexplored. Therefore, we conduct a multiple case study using a dyadic sample of interviews with owner-managers and non-family employees in nine German family firms. The cross-case analysis shows that in firms with strong enterprising family influence, the identification of non-family employees is heightened, intrinsically motivating them to become intrapreneurially active. Our findings also reveal that in family firms with reduced enterprising family influence, this intrinsic motivation decreases. Furthermore, we observe the establishment of certain business mechanisms in these firms aimed at fostering the extrinsic motivation of non-family employees.

Studies analyzing the entrepreneurial orientation of family businesses compared to their nonfamily counterparts have contributed to spreading the myth that family firms are less entrepreneurially oriented. However, the distinctive aspects characterizing the entrepreneurial orientation of family firms have received less scholarly attention. Aiming to advance this literature stream, this study postulates that family businesses are neither more nor less entrepreneurially oriented than nonfamily firms but express their entrepreneurial orientation differently, even when manifesting a similar level of entrepreneurial orientation. Building on entrepreneurial orientation studies and adopting a family embeddedness perspective, our multi-case study of 10 small artisan family firms with a high entrepreneurial orientation shows that family firms express their entrepreneurial orientation according to a set of interplaying firm- and family-level factors. The relationship among these factors leads to three different entrepreneurial orientation configurations: generational clash, family mirroring, and evolutionary adaptation. Our study of these configurations and the underlying nuances provide novel contributions to the literature and several implications for practice.

A variety of work has explored the firm level influences impacting innovativeness in family firms, yet little emphasis has been placed on the effect of the business family on family firm innovativeness. Drawing on the resource-based view and family commitment literatures, this analysis answers recent calls to consider the simultaneous influence the family system and the business system have on entrepreneurial activities. Using primary data, we study 275 family firms from multiple countries, to enhance our understanding of the fundamentals of family firm entrepreneurship. Specifically, we examine how family commitment influences family firm resource stocks (i.e., human, social, and financial), which consequently impact the entrepreneurial family firm outcome, innovativeness. Our findings suggest that some resource stocks (i.e., human and social capitals) mediate this relationship, whereas another resource stock (i.e., financial capital) does not. Our analysis demonstrates the differential impact of the disparate forms of capital on family firms’ innovativeness.

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.