Journal of Family Business Strategy最新文献

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.

The benefits or drawbacks of family social capital for family firm performance are hotly debated among scholars. Most of the debate adopts an internal view of family social capital and focuses on familial relations taking place within the boundaries of the family firm or the family business group. However, overlooked in this debate is the role of potentially valuable family bonds held with family members outside the family firm and the family business group’s boundaries—family members working for other firms without ownership connections. We strive to advance this debate by placing the focus on a new category of family social capital originating from social relations with family members working in other firms in the same industry. In so doing, we theoretically and empirically tease out how the number of ties with family members located in other independent firms within the boundaries of a given industry affects family firms’ performance. We also account for the moderating effect on this baseline relationship of the number of ties with members of other firms not bearing a family connection. In so doing, we add new insights to address the paradox among family firm studies about why seemingly vital social relations only sometimes matter for family firm performance.

Family firms are the most ubiquitous form of business organization in any world economy. Family Business Review, Journal of Family Business Strategy, and Journal of Family Business Management are the three leading academic journals exclusively dedicated to this type of firms. Since the inception of the first of the three journals in 1988, these outlets published 1381 articles dealing with family business. This study offers a comprehensive bibliometric overview of these contributions, thereby providing a complete overview of family business research conducted in the three dedicated journals in this field, and laying the ground for future developments. We do not limit our effort to describe the field from a bibliometric perspective, but furthermore unearth the most debated topics, link thematically the aspects emerging from our review, and offer promising avenues for future research.

Studies on succession in family business have recognized the importance of the transfer of social capital to ensure a firm’s continuity and growth. However, although previous research has focused on succession as a one-to-one phenomenon, more and more successions in the real world are collective successions. Therefore, this study focuses on the transfer of external social capital (ESC) from a predecessor to a team of siblings because succession to a shared-leadership team changes the traditional way of transferring ESC. Using a qualitative analysis of six Canadian family companies, we show how a sibling succession process evolves for ESC transfer. We also demonstrate how predecessors transfer operational ESC on an individual basis and strategic ESC on a collective basis to the shared-leadership team. The findings also explain how successors acquire their predecessors’ ESC and use their own ESC to renew firm ESC. Those outcomes are summarized in seven propositions.

While nonlinear relationships play an important role in explaining distinct family business behaviors and outcomes, researchers rarely consider them in their theoretical and statistical models. To address this concern, this article introduces partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) as a suitable means for estimating nonlinear effects in latent variable models and describes its advantages vis-à-vis multiple (sum scores) regression. We conceptually compare and empirically illustrate the two methods by means of a family business research model. Based on our discussions, we provide family business researchers with a checklist of best practice recommendations when applying PLS-SEM. The article adds new methodological instruments to the family business researchers’ toolbox that enable them to explain and explore the mutual and often nonlinear interactions between family and business. Thereby, this research contributes to more rigorous and meaningful family business science.

Family owners differ from other types of owners due to the presence of socioemotional wealth (SEW) concerns. We take a closer look at this distinctive aspect by examining the impact of family control and influence dimension of SEW on the cash management choices of family firms, conceptualizing it as a mixed gamble choice. Our empirical analysis of 195 Italian firms listed on the Milan Stock Exchange between 2003 and 2015 shows that family firms derive more value and incur lower costs than nonfamily firms when they increase their cash holdings. We then delve deeper into family firms’ cash management choices by exploring how different levels of family control and influence as well as types of board governance arrangements moderate this relationship. The empirical results indicate that the positive effects of family ownership are more pronounced under a high level of family control and influence and with separation of the board chair and CEO positions.