Journal of Family Business Strategy最新文献

In family businesses, women who belong to the owning family are increasingly appointed to leadership positions. Nevertheless, their managerial roles do not overlap well with their multiple family roles and family expectations, and they are often trapped in a “golden cage.” Drawing on a multilevel view of legitimacy, we analyze twenty-one in-depth interviews with CEOs, managing directors, and cofounders of family firms to untap the legitimation of women’s leadership. We propose a framework that explores the types of judgments (instrumental, relational, and moral) underpinning such a process. Our findings suggest that multiple role empowerment of women and exposure of daughters to family businesses increase legitimacy, whereas hiding family identities and role conflicts hinder it. The role carry-over that mothers have as chief emotional officers and an organizational context promoting gender equality indirectly contribute to the legitimation of women as leaders.

This study investigates how daughter successors perceive that their entrepreneurial identities have been influenced by their fathers. Drawing on narrative identity and identity work theories and adopting an inductive and interpretive approach, we analysed interviews with 21 daughters. The findings reveal that their perceptions of their fathers can influence their entrepreneurial identities in multiple ways, concerning both why daughters become family business successors and how their entrepreneurial identities are shaped. To examine this variety of experiences, this study proposes a typology of four processes through which daughters’ entrepreneurial identities were formed (submission, self-empowerment, enhancement, and idealisation) and how they perceive their fathers’ role (commander, patriarch, mentor, and myth) in influencing these processes. This study contributes to the family business and entrepreneurial identity fields of research by showing that daughters’ perceptions of the role they ascribe to their fathers can be powerful mental representations that exert a great influence on their entrepreneurial identity.

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.

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.

The paradoxical nature of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) provides unique opportunities to advance management theory. Focusing on a dominant theoretical framework, Socioemotional Wealth (SEW), we argue that contextual features of LAC, namely the concept of extended family and the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, make family businesses “SEW intensive” (i.e., high degree of preservation and enhancement of various aspects of SEW) and “SEW sensitive” (i.e., high degree of firm responsiveness to external factors that are SEW-relevant). In turn, these SEW features influence decision making and approaches to dealing with performance hazards and venturing risks. While we use LAC as a specific context, our theorizing and 12 propositions are also relevant to guide future research on other regions of the world, such as parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, where the concept of extended family is widespread and a VUCA environment is also predominant. Overall, we use the characteristics of the LAC context to challenge existing assumptions, advance theory, and guide future empirical research on family businesses.

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.