Journal of Family Business Strategy最新文献

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.

Succession is often a critical event in the lifecycle of any organization. Consequently, an extensive body of literature explores family firm succession, and includes studies on integrated succession frameworks. Notwithstanding the large, illuminating body of literature, we believe that family firm succession is worth a fresh reexamination and consolidation to translate the findings into a powerful planning and communication tool, especially as all firms are facing a ‘new normal’ and their leaders are seeking novel perspectives and approaches amidst the COVID-19 disruption. We thus offer a systemic and systematic framework for family firm succession planning, incorporating ideas from the technology intelligence literature. Since relationship building can ease the succession process and relationships are built through communication, we also present a succession roadmap as a communication tool that can assist in making this process part of the regular business routines.

Job benefits can raise employee satisfaction and thus contribute to a firm’s overall success. However, little is known about how job benefits impact employee satisfaction across different forms of organizations. In this study, we argue that family and non-family firms differ in their social exchange systems and that the fit between the prevalent social exchange system and three types of job benefits (i.e., job benefits of care, status, and life quality) offered to employees influences the extent to which job benefits affect employee satisfaction. We build on a dataset of 2,180 German family and non-family firms gathered from an online employer review platform (Kununu) to test our hypotheses. Results show that job benefits of care lead to more employee satisfaction in family firms, while non-family firms profit more in terms of employee satisfaction from job benefits of life quality. Counterintuitively, we find that job benefits of status lead to higher employee satisfaction in family firms. We contribute to the knowledge on family firms as employers as well as job benefits and employee satisfaction.

Family businesses exhibit a strong commitment to address societal challenges and social ills with direct consequences for the neighborhoods, cities, and regions where the businesses are located. In this article, we link these community-minded activities to the idea of civic wealth creation (CWC), a term that captures the local flavor of many positive social change efforts being launched to improve and empower communities. Because of their high degree of community embeddedness (CE), that is, the extent to which an organization is associated with, relies on, and perceives a commitment to its community, we argue that family businesses are especially effective civic wealth creators. To illustrate, we present two examples of the CE–CWC relationship—Bush Brothers & Company in the U.S., and a cluster of Mittelstand companies in Attendorn, Germany. We discuss the practical implications of CE for family businesses and address several future research avenues for investigating CE and the CWC of family firms.

In the present study we argue that a more fine-grained perspective, taking into account different situations of family members’ involvement and the actual implementation of HRM practices and policies, is needed to provide an accurate picture of family firms as employers. Our study is carried out on a unique sample of 849 family firms in Italy and focuses on the conditions and consequences of adopting mutuality-promoting HRM practices in the family business context.