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This study presents paradoxical tensions as the ‘missing link’ at the intersection of the entrepreneurial family and family firm management: a link that crucially affects innovation-related decisions such as ambidexterity. Specifically, the study argues that the relationship between family cohesion and organizational ambidexterity within entrepreneurial family firms is mediated by paradoxical tensions (latent and salient). Drawing on survey data from 206 German family firms, support is found for the hypotheses advanced. Building on cognitive resource theory, this study demonstrates that differently perceived paradoxical tensions in entrepreneurial family firms have different meaningful effects on organizational ambidexterity. Implications for theory and future research are discussed.

Drawing on human capital theory and the knowledge-based view, our meta-analysis integrates the results from 85 independent samples spanning 2009–2020 (572,888 total observations). Our findings prov...

Research Question/Issue: We study the relationship between family blockholding of voting rights and the relative size of international acquisitions, and the moderating effect of two types of financial blockholders (pressure-resistant and pressure-sensitive blockholders).Research Findings/Insights: Employing an international sample of 8,687 nonfinancial cross-border acquisitions conducted by 4,630 acquirer firms from 40 home markets to 66 host countries between 2004 and 2013, we find a U-shaped relationship between family blockholding of voting rights and the relative size of international acquisitions. Further, we find evidence that this relationship is moderated by the presence and type of financial blockholders. While pressure-resistant financial blockholders shift this relationship downwards (due to intensified conflicts), pressure-sensitive financial blockholders shift it upwards.Theoretical/Academic Implications: We contribute to the literature on family firm governance and internationalization on several fronts. First, we revisit the predominant logic of linear effects of the family blockholding. We suggest the family blockholding's effects are related to nonlinear risk preferences of family owners, expressed through SEW slack. Second, we suggest that the “dominant shareholder interest” assumption of family firms, usually based on the controlling family's SEW should be interpreted contingent upon the interests of other financial shareholders. Finally, using family-financial blockholder conflicts as the scenario, we suggest that principal-principal conflicts depend on the composition of the conflicting blockholders, specifically, upon the nature of their relations with the firm.Practitioner/Policy Implications: This study offers insights to policymakers and those interested in incentivizing family ownership that family owners’ risk behaviors should be understood and discussed in the context of different financial blockholders as a reference group.

This meta-analysis of 142 studies from 36 countries examines how the institutional environment moderates the relationship between family involvement and firm performance. Specifically, we investigate performance differences between family and nonfamily firms while using property rights protection, institutional stability, and a country’s regime type as moderators. Our analysis shows that institutional stability serves as a decisive moderator of the relationship between family involvement and firm performance and that family firms outperform nonfamily firms in democracies and autocracies but not in anocracies. Based on these findings, we provide and discuss both practical recommendations for family firms and theoretical implications for institutional theory.

Current research suggests that entrepreneurship in the family business context is mainly induced by top-down firm-level activity. We propose that entrepreneurial activity is also initiated autonomously as a bottom-up process by individual members or a group of individual members of an entrepreneurial family (EF). Building on 63 interviews with EF members involved in 39 venturing cases, we reveal a set of unique motives driving the venturing activity and show how these motives are intertwined with six heterogeneous family venture types. We also emphasize how positioning (i.e., inside or outside of family firms’ boundaries), family support, emotional attachment, and transgenerational intention vary among the different venture types.

Research often assumes that a controlling family’s social bonds contributes to superior firm performance. However, there is little theory to address these relationships and findings are often mixed. Here, we integrate resource-based and need-to-belong theories to address these issues, introducing family business potency as a key mediating variable between family cohesion, participative strategy processes, and firm performance in 109 family firms. Altogether, our study answers ongoing theoretical calls for more need-based psychological research in family firms, introduces family business potency to the literature, and contributes to research on family firm heterogeneity. Implications for future research and practice are also discussed.

This study examines how five key entrepreneurial orientation (EO) dimensions—risk taking, innovativeness, proactiveness, competitive aggressiveness, and autonomy—affect family business performance, as well as the moderating effect of socioemotional wealth (SEW) on these relationships. The findings, based on a sample of 609 Spanish and Portuguese family firms, reveal that not all EO dimensions are equally important for performance, as only proactiveness, competitive aggressiveness, and autonomy were significant. However, we also find that the EO–performance relationship is affected by concern for SEW preservation, as our SEW measure moderates risk taking positively and innovativeness negatively.JEL CLASSIFICATION: L20; L26; M10

In this introductory article for the special issue of Journal of Management Studies, entitled ‘Leading Entrepreneurial Ventures: Individual and Team‐Based Perspectives’, we leverage insights in the extant literature as well as those insights developed by the authors of the four articles published in response to our call for papers. Overall, we explore multiple nuanced questions with regards to research on entrepreneurship, research on leadership, and their intersection. Our goal is to begin to help guide research on entrepreneurship and leadership, and their intersection, for the next decade.

We investigate how the four dimensions of the dynamic capabilities (DC) construct (sensing, learning, integrating, and coordinating) individually affect firm performance and the moderating role of market orientation (MO) in the process. Our findings, based on a sample of 509 Spanish small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), suggest that not all DC dimensions are equally important for SME performance. We further found MO to significantly moderate the relationships between both the sensing capability and the learning capability and firm performance. The implications for research and practice are discussed.

We investigate the differential effect of time in terms of generation in control of the firm’s management on family firm performance to address the call in the literature for a more nuanced treatment of family firms and their performance differences. By drawing on the mixed-gamble logic of the behavioral agency model, our work suggests that the family’s socio-emotional wealth (SEW) varies across generations, resulting in complex performance relationships. We theorize and empirically find that earlier-generation family firms protect current SEW and perform increasingly worse while later-generation firms maximize prospective financial wealth and perform increasingly better. Additionally, we argue that high family control dispersion mitigates the negative effect on performance of earlier generations in control and increases the positive effect of later generations in control. Important theoretical and practical contributions emerge from this study.

This study builds and tests a model that explains entrepreneurs' emotional responses to events in their work lives while specifying the role of entrepreneurs' personality in moderating such responses. Drawing on the cognitive appraisal theory, we hypothesize that daily entrepreneurial stressors (workload and financial) exert negative influences on two discrete emotions (fear and pride) and that entrepreneurs' neuroticism and dispositional optimism can moderate the proposed relationships. We examined daily diary data of 61 entrepreneurs over a two-week period and found multilevel evidence of individual differences in entrepreneurs' emotional responses to these stressors at both the between- and within-person levels of analysis. We also found that neuroticism and optimism partially account for the examined relationships across both levels. This study contributes to the literature on stress-related emotional experiences in an entrepreneurial context by taking into account the type of stressor and the temporal framework across levels of analysis. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Drawing from conservation of resources theory, we theorize that spiritual leadership serves as both a resource to enhance employees’ organizational commitment and a passageway to mitigate the negative effects of work–family conflict. Using primary triadic data from leaders, family employees, and nonfamily employees in 77 family firms, results support our theorizing that organizational commitment is enhanced by spiritual leadership but is decreased by work–family conflict. Contrary to theory, however, spiritual leadership exacerbated the negative effects of work–family conflict. Further analysis reveals that family and nonfamily employees respond differently to leadership and work–family stressors. While spiritual leadership has positive effects for family employees, it has negative effects for nonfamily employees experiencing high work–family conflict.

To enrich understanding of the causes of entrepreneurial orientation (EO), we examine whether and how EO is rooted in organizational culture. Following a new conceptualization of EO and based on data from 269 Mexican firms, we theorize and find that organizational culture is a strategic resource that firms can use to cultivate EO and this influence is more transmitted through firms’ entrepreneurial behaviors than through managers’ attitude towards risk. Further, this process is moderated by firms’ strategic planning. We hope that our study demonstrates the promise of the new conceptualization of EO and stimulates more research towards the EO antecedent direction. We also hope that the results help improving the understanding and contextualization of EO in an under-studied area --Latin America.

In family firms, the decision to voluntarily disclose individual supervisory board compensation induces confidence in the family firm's governance system, but may also compromise a family's efforts to keep exclusive control. Drawing on socioemotional wealth (SEW) research, we investigate family influence on a firm's voluntary disclosure decisions while distinguishing between different types of firms: non-family, true family (TFF), and lone founder firms (LFF). Our findings demonstrate the complex influence of two control-enhancing factors, family CEO and high ownership concentration, on disclosure decisions.

While previous studies focus on differences between family and nonfamily firms regarding CEO selection and executive compensation, this study investigates differences among family firms with different types of kinship ties. We find that, compared with family firms with close kinship ties, those with distant kinship ties are more likely to appoint a nonfamily CEO and to pay nonfamily executives lower salaries. This relationship is moderated by firm performance and family ownership. Based on evolutionary psychology, we propose that family firms with close versus distant kinships have different motivation levels to preserve socioemotional wealth.

Drawing on family firm heterogeneity research, we develop a typology of family firms using differences in family influence and firm life cycle. We offer hypotheses regarding the relationships between the different firm types and two important outcomes: Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and performance. Applying latent profile analysis to a sample of 684 Spanish and Portuguese family firms using variables related to family influence (i.e., ownership, family CEO) and firm life cycle (i.e., generational management, size, and presence of board of directors), we find four family firm types, which differentially affect EO and performance. Implications of our findings for EO, family firm performance, and the development of family firm typologies are discussed.

Goals represent an organization’s desired outcomes, and family businesses are known to pursue multiple goals, which commonly include both financial and non-financial aspects. While family business goals have garnered much attention among researchers, relatively little is known about the approaches that family businesses use to shape their idiosyncratic goal sets. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, we review the family business literature and synthesize the current knowledge regarding goal formation. Second, we incorporate insights from extant organizational goal literature and discuss various approaches (algorithms)—specifically, maximizing, satisficing, and optimizing—that family businesses may employ to select goals. These insights form the foundation for our discussion and recommendations for future research aimed at furthering the understanding of family business goal formation.

Research at the interface of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) and family firms’ domains has grown steadily based on the premise that family firms’ specific elements uniquely affect CE antecedents, strategies, and outcomes. However, much remains to be uncovered. In this article, we offer a theoretical advancement of a corporate entrepreneurship process model for the case of family firms organized around the categories of ontology (i.e., domain redefinition), epiphany (i.e., new components and mechanisms), and heterogeneity (i.e., family firm variety and contingencies). This development paves the way for an agenda for future research and for possible generalizations to non-family firms.

Research Question/Issue: We study the relationship between family blockholding of voting rights and the relative size of international acquisitions, and the moderating effect of two types of financial blockholders (pressure-resistant and pressure-sensitive blockholders). Research Findings/Insights: Employing an international sample of 8,687 nonfinancial cross-border acquisitions conducted by 4,630 acquirer firms from 40 home markets to 66 host countries between 2004 and 2013, we find a U-shaped relationship between family blockholding of voting rights and the relative size of international acquisitions. Further, we find evidence that this relationship is moderated by the presence and type of financial blockholders. While pressure-resistant financial blockholders shift this relationship downwards (due to intensified conflicts), pressure-sensitive financial blockholders shift it upwards. Theoretical/Academic Implications: We contribute to the literature on family firm governance and internationalization on several fronts. First, we revisit the predominant logic of linear effects of the family blockholding. We suggest the family blockholding’s effects are related to nonlinear risk preferences of family owners, expressed through SEW slack. Second, we suggest that the “dominant shareholder interest” assumption of family firms, usually based on the controlling family’s SEW should be interpreted contingent upon the interests of other financial shareholders. Finally, using family-financial blockholder conflicts as the scenario, we suggest that principal-principal conflicts depend on the composition of the conflicting blockholders, specifically, upon the nature of their relations with the firm. Practitioner/Policy Implications: This study offers insights to policymakers and those interested in incentivizing family ownership that family owners’ risk behaviors should be understood and discussed in the context of different financial blockholders as a reference group.

Highlights • We link social exchange relationships to the family relationships in entrepreneurship. • Family support have mixed effects on entrepreneurial stressors-well-being relationships. • The moderating effects entail more between-person heterogeneity than within -person heterogeneity., Current studies suggest mixed effects concerning the impact of the family system on entrepreneurial outcomes. Through the integration of the family embeddedness theory and social exchange theory, we further investigate the potential benefits and costs of family support as a social exchange process between entrepreneurs and their family members. We propose that perceived family support can differentially shape well-being across different entrepreneurial contexts (financial and workload stressors) depending on the nature of the exchange relationship (economic vs. social), thereby dual effects are anticipated from time-based and temporal processes. After analyzing the data gathered from 61 entrepreneurs over 14 days, we found evidence that high levels of family support attenuate the relationships between the financial stressor and the well-being indicators but amplify the relationships between the workload stressor and the well-being indicators. These results demonstrate family support process models are central to between-person heterogeneity. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Despite evidence pointing to differences between family and nonfamily firms regarding entrepreneurial orientation (EO), market orientation (MO), and learning orientation (LO), little is known of the relationships between these variables in the family business context. Drawing on the resource-based view (RBV) and a sample of 509 Spanish small and medium enterprises (SMEs), our results suggest that the family business context promotes the LO-EO link, which helps explain why some firms are more entrepreneurially oriented than other firms.

This study investigates the effect of family characteristics on the internationalization activities of Chinese family small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) using a socioemotional wealth perspective. We suggest that family ownership negatively affects international expansion. Results using a sample of 1542 Chinese family SMEs support our hypothesis that there is a negative relationship between family ownership and international activities. Due to mixed findings in previous studies, we not only focus on both export intensity and export propensity, but also introduce family firm characteristics (i.e., presence of founder CEOs and family succession intention) as moderators. We argue that these moderators capture a temporal aspect of socioemotional wealth (SEW) and find that they strengthen the negative relationship between family ownership and internationalization. Our study contributes to family firm internationalization research by disentangling the relationship between family firm characteristics and internationalization, as well as SEW research.

We investigate how family relationship conflict and family and firm name congruence influence subjective firm valuations by family firm owner-managers. Drawing on the socioemotional wealth perspective, behavioral agency theory and mixed gamble reasonings, we hypothesize and find a U-shaped association between relationship conflict inside the family firm and subjective firm valuation. While we do not find a direct effect between name congruence and subjective firm valuation, we show that name congruence interacts with relationship conflict to affect valuations in a complex fashion. Implications and contributions of our findings are discussed.

How do entrepreneurs fill institutional voids that prevail in emerging markets? By incorporating insights from both the political and family embeddedness perspectives, we argue that both political ties and family ties can compensate for gaps in the institutional infrastructure of emerging markets. Specifically, we propose and examine the partial substitutability of family ties for political ties as a means of filling institutional voids. Our empirical work based on Chinese private enterprises strongly supports this argument. We also find that the effective utilization of family ties is contingent on both family members’ motivation (willingness to use resources for the firm) and entrepreneurs’ mobilization (authority in the family to mobilize family members). This study bridges the literature on political ties and family ties to understand their respective costs and benefits and therefore advances our understanding of entrepreneurs’ networking strategies in emerging markets.

Organizational learning can be a key shared value that perpetuates the family's and the family firm's culture across generations. Imprinting theory helps to explain the impact that lessons learned and transmitted can have on the development of human resources in the family firm. However, the results of imprinting may not necessarily be positive, particularly when imprinting manifests itself in negative processes and expectations. Whereas imprinting and organizational learning are often associated with a “positive halo effect,” they have the potential to result in negative behaviors and deleterious firm-level outcomes. Employing imprinting theory as a framework, we highlight the potential dark side of imprinting within the family firm context and how it can damage human resource efforts and threaten company performance and firm survival. Finally, we suggest how bad habits may be broken and replaced with more effective routines so as to ensure the family firm's continuity and success.

Goals are a key differentiator between family businesses and non‐family businesses. To improve understanding of this topic, the authors take stock of what they know about goals in family business. They synthesize prior research findings and classify the research into five categories: family business goal antecedents; goal characteristics; goal‐related outcomes; moderators of goal outcomes; and feedback loop. The paper concludes by highlighting future research to advance both family business goal and general management research.

We explore the relationship between the calculative commitment of family firm CEOs and cohesion in family firms and discuss how this relationship is affected by the interplay of calculative commitm...

The influence of the industrial sector is a long-standing assumption in entrepreneurship studies, yet the mechanisms through which the industrial sector shapes entrepreneurial phenomena and the processes through which entrepreneurial actors interact with sectors to prospect, develop, and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities remain largely under-theorized and little understood. We critically reexamine the notion of “sector” in entrepreneurship research, advancing a more dynamic view of the industrial sectors captured by the concept of sector fluidity and identifying three approaches to move the sector more prominently onto the “front seat” of entrepreneurship theory and research. Defining sector-based entrepreneurial capabilities and examining their importance to advance current understanding of industry-specific determinants, processes, and outcomes of entrepreneurship, we set out an agenda for further research aimed at advancing sector studies in entrepreneurship.

Socioemotional wealth (SEW) research has been criticized for not directly assessing the locus and drivers of family members’ SEW. We propose that a social psychological approach to SEW can help address these concerns, conducting analyses on 421 articles published across 25 journals during the first decade of SEW research. We therefore assess how SEW has been used and identify various inherent complexities that SEW poses for researchers. Altogether, our analyses afford us opportunities to better understand SEW scholarship’s social psychological roots and to propose an agenda that can help further build and extend the psychological microfoundations of family firms.

Upper echelon theory highlights the importance of top management teams in large and established firms; however, effects are not always clear outside of this context. Due to the unique nature of new ventures, the composition of entrepreneurial teams and its effects on performance is worthy of investigation. Accordingly, we meta–analyze the effect of three characteristics of entrepreneurial team composition (i.e., aggregated, heterogeneity, team size) on new venture performance. Our meta–analysis, which includes 55 empirical samples and 8,892 observations, finds significant and unique effects of entrepreneurial team characteristics on new ventures. Based on our findings, we derive avenues for future research.

This article theoretically and empirically intertwines agency and stewardship theories to examine their distinct and combined influences on family firms. Primary matched triadic data from CEOs, family employees, and nonfamily employees in 77 family firms suggest that agency and stewardship governance affects individual-level behavior and firm-level performance. Specifically, agent behavior is highest under conditions of coexisting low agency governance and high stewardship governance and is lowest when agency and stewardship governance coexist at high levels. Furthermore, when high levels of agency and stewardship governance coexist, family firm performance is the highest. Theoretical implications and future research directions are discussed.

In a study of family firms that included survey responses from both family CEOs and family member employees, we examined the roles that collaboration and CEO monitoring play regarding the prevalence of extra-role behavior, an important human resource outcome that can impact job performance and firm performance. Results indicated that an integration of stewardship and agency theories (manifested through interactions between family harmony and adaptability with monitoring) helps explain the level of extra-role behavior displayed by family employees. The findings lend some support for the argument that effective human resource practices in family firms should be balanced between instrumental governance mechanisms that reflect a monitoring approach and normative mechanisms that focus on collaborative efforts among family employees. When this balance is achieved, an environment of fairness and accountability rather than a tone of distrust and forced compliance may prevail in family firms, thus addressing a key human resource issue in this hybrid form of organization. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Although many start-ups struggle to grow partly due to institutional voids in transitioning economies, empirical observations have contradicted this dominant view in the literature in that even with deficient formal institutions many economies (e.g., China) have high rates of entrepreneurship in recent years. To understand this paradox, we propose a politically contingent view of the relationship between the institutional environment and entrepreneurs' reinvestment in their business. Our empirical study of entrepreneurs in China shows that the impact of institutional deterioration on entrepreneurial reinvestment substantially hinges on entrepreneurs' political connections. As such, institutional deterioration does not reduce entrepreneurial reinvestment for all entrepreneurs; rather, when entrepreneurs have political connections they are willing to reinvest in their business despite a weakening institutional environment. Our framework suggests that in an environment perceived as harsh to business, political connections can encourage entrepreneurs to see opportunities for growth. In contrast, entrepreneurs that lack political connections will mainly see threats in a deteriorating institutional environment and thus, limit their business reinvestment.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the differential effects of workplace stress and the use of social support by contingent vs standard employees.Design/methodology/approachConservation of resources (COR) theory is used to frame research questions. Using content analysis of 40 interviews from individuals in the hospitality industry, differences between the levels of stress reported by contingent and standard employees as well as differences in their use of social support networks to offset stress is examined.FindingsContingent employees report experiencing more stress than do standard employees in the same profession. Furthermore, contingent employees seek out more social support than do standard employees. There was no difference between the two groups with respect to the desire for social support from three sources: vertical, horizontal, and customer groups.Originality/valueThis study extends the literature on contingent workers, the literature on how different types of employees deal with stress, as well as adding to the COR literature by showing that contingent employees experience and assuage their stress differently than do standard employees.

Over the last decades, human resource management has received increasing attention in family business scholarship. However, works on human resource management in the context of family firms remain relatively low as compared to the more general body of studies on human resource management. This article introduces our special issue of the German Journal of Human Resource Management, which discusses facets of how family firms configure human resource management and set human resource practices. We first give a brief overview on the conceptual and empirical research that relates to and informs human resource management within family firms, resulting in a human resource system framework. We then discuss ideas for future human resource management research, namely, the influence of the owning family on human resource orientation, non-family employees as human resource recipients and the role of human resource professionals in delivering human resource management. Furthermore, we call for making psychological foundations part of the human resource management scholarship agenda. There is still work to be done before human resource management can find its ‘place in the sun’ in the family business community. Hence, this special issue contributes to developing family business human resource management scholarship further by offering the human resource system framework, by suggesting directions for future research and by advancing our conceptual and empirical understanding of human resource management in the context of family firms.

We demonstrate how latent profile analysis (LPA) can be applied to generate profiles (i.e., homogenous subgroups) in a sample of family firms. In doing so, we highlight how LPA can provide additional insight into family firm phenomena when used in conjunction with other methodological approaches (i.e., regression). We compare LPA with other techniques (i.e., cluster analysis and qualitative comparative analysis) and show LPA’s superior ability to capture complex patterns of important family firm characteristics. We demonstrate how profiles can be linked to differences in dependent variables, providing family firm scholars with a tool to assess heterogeneity and its consequences among family firms.