Journal of Family Business Strategy最新文献

This study takes a fresh look at the credibility of corporate communication in family firms, as compared to corporate communication in non-family firms, in voluntary sustainability reporting. In his pioneering work Hsueh (2018) discovered that family firms suffer from a credibility disadvantage in terms of their sustainability reporting efforts, from the point of view of external stakeholders. This is called the ‘credibility gap’. This finding however is in stark contrast to the superior trust attribution of external stakeholders towards family firms in the general family firm literature. Our replication study shows that indeed, family firms do not suffer from a credibility gap compared to their non-family firm counterparts. In fact, in our experimental extension we can show that family firms, when perceived as such, are considered to be benevolent, which in turn increases the credibility of their sustainability reporting from an external perspective. Thus, contrary to the original study by Hsueh (2018), we suggest that family firms have a credibility advantage over non-family firms when it comes to their sustainability reporting. Furthermore, our results suggest that this credibility advantage remains, even when tested with specific stakeholder roles (customers, job-seekers), and that it ultimately influences their interactions with the firm positively.

Our goal is to foster the development of a healthy replication culture in family business research. Replication, which advances theory by confronting existing understanding with new evidence, is of paramount importance in creating a meaningful cumulative knowledge base. In the family business field, however, as in many other fields within the broader management literature, dedicated replications are largely absent. After a brief analysis of the likely causes and consequences of our collective avoidance of replication studies, we examine four types of replication of particular importance to the field and provide guidelines and recommendations for family business scholars interested in conducting such research. We invite journals and their editors to reflect on the role they can play in changing the incentive structures to conduct and submit useful replication studies and provide actionable suggestions for improvement. We illustrate contemporary examples of family business knowledge advancement through replication research.

We replicate, in the Chinese context, a study undertaken in 2007 by Miller, Le Breton-Miller, Lester, and Cannella (MLLC), which examined the performance differences among lone-founder firms, family firms, and nonfamily firms in the U.S. Our goal was to test the generalizability of MLLC’s findings, as well as uncover contextual nuances that might exist in a markedly different institutional context that also includes state-owned enterprises. Our results corroborate MLLC’s finding that lone-founder firms outperform other types of firms. We also find that when family ownership is at lower levels, family firms and nonfamily firms seem to have similar performance; however, family firms have a performance advantage at higher levels of family ownership. Finally, we find that state-owned enterprises are outperformed by lone-founder, family and nonfamily firms. Our study highlights the importance of distinguishing among different types of nonfamily firms, between family and lone-founder firms, and among family firms with different levels of family ownership. We discuss the implications of our findings and offer suggestions for future research in family business.

Using a sample of 409 Chinese family businesses, we replicate and extend an influential study undertaken by Chrisman et al. (2012). Consistent with Chrisman et al. (2012), we confirm the bridging position of family essence in transforming family influence into family-centered non-economic goals in business. We also found that the theoretical model of Chrisman et al. (2012) can be used to explain the prevalence and magnitude of family-centered economic goals in Chinese family firms. In addition, we explore the impact of external regional differences and internal firm conditions in affecting the causal relationships among family involvement, family essence, and family-centered goals.

We use data on U.S. retailers’ responses to the advent of electronic commerce to empirically examine central elements of König, Kammerlander, and Enders’ (KKE 2013) framework on how family influence affects firms’ adoption of discontinuous technologies. We operationalize family influence using: (1) a manifest dichotomous measure of (non-)family firms; (2) a manifest multi-item measure of the “four Cs”; and (3) a language-based measure of the degree to which top managers’ cognition is oriented towards the four Cs. We find that the manifest dichotomous measure is unrelated to adoption speed, but negatively linked to adoption aggressiveness. The manifest multi-item measure is associated with faster and less aggressive adoption. Finally, the language-based measure is linked to slower but more aggressive adoption. These seemingly equivocal results offer empirical reference points for reflecting on KKE’s framework, including the implications of the ability and willingness in family firms for discontinuous technology adoption. We also address the intricacies of testing conceptual research on family influence.

We examine how socioemotional wealth (SEW) influences the relationship between family management and firm performance, constructively replicating and extending Sciascia, Mazzola, and Kellermanns (2014). We apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis on a sample of 277 privately-owned US family firms and measure SEW both directly and via unidimensional proxies. In agreement with the authors’ findings, our results show that family management relates positively to performance in later-generation family firms. Our findings also show that SEW is sufficient for high family firm performance, challenging the view that family firms face a trade-off between pursuing affective goals and achieving profitability. Both findings, however, hold only when SEW is directly measured, underscoring the importance of adopting a multidimensional and universally accepted operationalization of SEW for an accurate and robust understanding of its true relationship to family firm outcomes.

The number of studies referencing socioemotional wealth (SEW) stands in stark contrast to the number of papers actually employing direct and multidimensional measures of SEW. Despite the FIBER scale reaching its tenth anniversary, and despite a preliminary validation by Hauck et al. (2016), the direct measurement of SEW has nevertheless been met with remarkable conservatism. This is counterintuitive, given the frequent demand for a validated, direct, and multidimensional SEW scale of practical length. In this paper we replicate and extend the first validation of the FIBER scale, undertaken by Hauck et al. (2016). Our results offer an improved (short) scale that is validated with psychometric rigor (N = 1019) and demonstrates generalizability.

Whilst Socioemotional Wealth (SEW) has been acknowledged in a vast amount of family firm literature, most papers continue to treat this construct at the theoretical level, while assuming that all family firms possess SEW and strive to preserve it. However, family firms are highly heterogeneous and it is therefore possible that there is much variance in SEW across these organisations. Using a large sample of family firms from Spain, the original FIBER scale proposed by Berrone et al. (2012) is validated with items that were inferentially drawn from a literature review, and we compared our results with those of Hauck et al. (2016) in Austria/Germany and those of Filser et al. (2018) in Finland. We reduced the original five dimension FIBER model to three dimensions, namely identification of family members with the firm, emotional attachment, and renewal of family bonds through intrafamily succession.

Drawing on generational theory, we argue that family millennials’ involvement is a driver of export intensity in family firms, but it depends on two different CEO characteristics, namely: family membership and societal generational membership. An ordered probit regression analysis on 92 Italian family firms confirms that the involvement of family millennials positively influences export intensity and that a millennial CEO enhances that positive effect. In addition, we found that a non-family CEO amplifies such a positive effect, whereas a family CEO tends to turn the tide so that the effect of family millennials’ involvement becomes negative. The novel findings of our explorative study contribute not only to the research on family business and internationalization, but also to the literature on generational theory.

Dividends are an important means of paying shareholders. At the same time, dividends can drain resources useful to grow the business. Focusing on privately-owned family firms, we argue that an important and unexplored feature driving dividend payout is the dispersion of equity shares among family members. Due to potential differences in family owners’ priorities, we hypothesize that equity dispersion is positively associated with dividends. This relationship, however, is weaker for firms led by a family member, first-generation firms, and firms in uncertain industry contexts. Our empirical analysis supports these hypotheses.