Management methods and tools in family businesses: Impact on the effectiveness of achieving goals

Efficient management at family businesses, like all other enterprises, requires the use of appropriate methods and tools. However, in many cases, the people managing these entities do not have any formal business education and often follow their intuition and act on experience gained over the years. The purpose of this article is to determine the extent to which select management methods and tools are used in Polish family businesses and to examine their impact on the effectiveness of achieving various objectives. A survey was conducted on a group of 182 managers of family businesses from Poland, who were asked about the effectiveness of achieving goals and the methods and tools used in management. The goals have been aggregated into three main groups: family goals, business goals, and a mix of family and business goals. Then, using statistical methods, the impact of the selected management methods and tools on the effectiveness of these three groups of objectives was examined. The conducted analysis has shown that family businesses in Poland make little use of professional management methods and tools and are rather limited to the intuitive use of the simplest methods, which they often cannot even professionally name. The research results indicate that the use of these methods only partially influences the effectiveness of achieving the set goals, and this impact can be observed in all three groups. In view of the above, the basic task of the broader family business environment is to improve the knowledge of professional management methods and tools among family business managers. From the scientific point of view, further research in this area is also necessary because little use of management methods and tools, especially those more professional, makes it difficult to broaden the study of the actual impact of these instruments on the effectiveness of achieving family business objectives