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This paper investigates the impact of family influence measured by the F-PEC scale on private enterprise (both family firms and lone founders) leadership succession strategy.

The research dataset is comprised of 390 private enterprises whose head offices were situated in the voivodeships of Lower Silesia and Wielkopolska in Poland. The authors collected data through CAPI (computer-assisted personal interviewing) method, as well as through comprehensive, structured interviews with company owners. Data were analysed using hierarchical logistic regression for each type of succession strategy.

The results suggest that increased family influence does not necessarily lead to intra-family leadership succession in private enterprises. Importantly, a range of findings contradicted authors' predictions. The relationship between the overall F-PEC scale values signifying the multi-faceted family influence over the business and the choice of internal successor was weakly negative for the total sample; also, the higher the overlap between family and business values and the higher the commitment to family business, as evidenced by the Culture subscale, the lower was the occurrence of intra-family successor choice in the population of lone founders. The Culture subscale also increased the prevalence of lack of succession planning in the sample of lone founders.

While several studies suggests that family firms may be more prone to choose an intra-family succession scenario, it remains unclear how lower levels of business and succession experience, may influence the successor choice. Indeed, some studies suggest that a strong family influence over a business, may stimulate family firms to choose a family outsider as a business leader. Therefore, the key contribution of this study is contextualizing the response to an ongoing succession debate. This study investigates the strategic choices of companies in the first generation of ownership operating in Poland, which serves as an example of a post-transition economy. While the characteristics of this economic environment may be unique, the authors discuss how the surprising findings may add to the understanding of the general succession processes present in private enterprises.

This paper aims to review the important themes in the literature on organizational culture (OC) in family firms.

The review of the current literature is organized around three themes: nature of OC in family firms, antecedents of OC in family firms and outcomes of OC in family firms. The discussion on each theme is followed by the suggested pointers for future research.

Much is known about the identified three themes in the literature on OC in family firms. However, the current review also highlights the limitations of the available literature. With regard to the nature of OC, some inconsistent findings are reported in the literature with regard to the types of prevailing OC in family firms. The literature also reveals a range of positive outcomes of OC. Significantly less research examines the influence of environmental factors and other moderators of OC. Given the focus of the current literature on developed countries, there is a need of more comparative studies in emerging as well as developing countries to understand how contextual factors affect OC in family business settings.

For each theme, the suggested pointers for future research serve as a springboard for future research and improve the theoretical understanding of OC in family firms.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the relationship between family involvement and Initial Public Offering (IPO) value in the Italian context.

Based on a unique hand-collected data set, the authors test the hypotheses on companies that went public between 2000 and 2011, making inference on 113 firms using OLS hierarchical regressions. The authors quantify the IPO value from an outside investors’ perspective with two measures to proxy for IPO value in the short-term and apply robustness checks for long-run performance. In a stewardship framework, the authors examine demographic variables including family firm status, family involvement in managerial positions and family generations.

The results suggest that family firm status positively influences IPO value, that greater family involvement corresponds to higher IPO value and lastly, that the beneficial effect of family control is mainly attributable to the first generation. The results are robust to alternative specifications of each phenomenon.

As a single-country study, the results refer exclusively to the Italian context and thus the evidence provided may not automatically be generalized to IPOs of comparable equity markets.

This study expands current knowledge by showing how investors “price” family ownership in an IPO; furthermore the authors assess how certain characteristics of family firms affect the IPOs (e.g. family involvement and intergenerational).

Introduces the special issue which focuses on family business entrepreneurial developments. Outlines the articles in the issue which not only increase our repository of family business research, but also provide useful insights for new research addressing topics such as family business centred ethnic entrepreneurship, “interpreneurship” and “intrapreneurship”, succession planning, financial philosophies; governance‐boards, consultation‐communication practices, and strategy formulation.

The purpose of this paper is to propose advances for developing our understandings of valuable resources in small family firms. The focus is on group support behavior within firms. It is proposed that this behavior is unique and valuable within small family firms. Propositions are presented that are built upon previous work in psychology and family business research and is linked to the concept of familiness.

Two small family businesses are the two cases used to investigate the propositions. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the owner/manager and several other staff within each firm.

The paper presents evidence for the propositions, showing that work group support is unique in family firms as it is based on factors beyond the workplace. These relationships have the potential to be strong, contributing positively to the firm’s competitive advantage.

Two in-depth case studies of firms are included in this investigation. They are in a similar industry and location. As the findings are similar it lends weight to the evidence for the propositions; however, care should be taken with generalizing to other firms in other industries.

This research pulls together previous evidence and understandings and applies them to a specific aspect of small family firms that has not previously been examined in depth. The increased understanding can help family firms leverage their unique competitive advantage.

The purpose of this paper is to explore relationships between different governance configurations and firm survival. The objective is to describe the alternative mechanisms through which the owning family takes a stake in the governance of the firm.

The governance systems of 116 family enterprises in Lebanon are examined. The study integrates family, ownership, leadership and the business itself constituting the four structural elements of a family firm's governance system. Then, the study tests four hypotheses whether the family, the ownership, the leadership and the business dimensions influence positively firm survival/longevity. The other hypotheses tested concern the advisory services and the legal form of the board, and how that might affect the survival/longevity of the family firm.

This integrative view allows observation of interactions among the different structures, and the establishment of a coordinating governing structure. Hypotheses testing results show that family, leadership and business dimensions have an impact on the performance/survival of the firm, whereas the ownership dimension has no effect.

Limitations of this paper relate to the relatively small size of the sample, and the sampled firms are young and small according to international standards. The study also suffers from common method bias and external validity.

The proposed framework allows the establishment of a governance structure, for control and co‐ordination. Ownership should be integrally separated from the other dimensions in the governance of a family firm to be able to achieve fairly good performance and ensure the survival and longevity of the firm.

No other studies have been conducted on Lebanon. Moreover, the study integrates the four governance mechanisms developed by Klein which was not done previously.

This study examines how stewardship might mediate the influence of family ownership on firm financial performance. The authors argue that differences in financial performance may reflect not only the family's influence but also the prevalence of a stewardship-oriented culture, across varying degrees of family influence.

The measure of family influence uses the F-PEC scale: family [F], power [P], experience [E] and culture [C]. It supports cross-firm comparisons of different levels of family influence. To capture the multidimensional nature of family influence, this study uses structural equation modelling and measures the meditating effects of stewardship.

The results reveal a mediating effect of stewardship; family firms achieve better performance when they take advantage of and encourage stewardship attitudes among owners and leaders. Factors associated with stewardship behaviour, including stewardship motivation and stewardship culture, help explain why some family firms perform better than others.

When analysing the behaviour of family firms, interested entrepreneurs, managers and consultants should acknowledge that the family's influence entails both financial and emotional capital. The survival of the family businesses depends on balancing these aspects.

In response to calls for research into mediators of the complex relationship between family influence and firm outcomes, this study provides a novel explanation for performance-maximizing behaviours by organizations, in which pro-organizational attitudes coexist with self-serving motives.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the tax aggressiveness among family firms considering their different levels of family involvement. Based on the family influence on power, experience, and culture approach proposed by Astrachan et al. (2002), this study examines to what extent the heterogeneity among family firms generates distinctive (and unique resource) combinations of family involvement that explain different levels of tax aggressiveness.

A sample of 282 small and medium-sized family enterprises and a structural equation modeling approach have been used to study simultaneously the effects of family influence through the power, experience, and culture dimensions of tax aggressiveness in family firms.

The family influences the business’ tax aggressiveness in different ways. As such, the greater the family experience, by the incorporation of second and subsequent generations, the greater the tax aggressiveness; in contrast, greater family power in terms of firm ownership and management negatively affects tax aggressiveness. Additionally, greater alignment of the family and business culture does not exert a significant effect on tax behaviors of family firms.

Tax aggressiveness is a complex activity that should be managed from a global point of view in family firms. Managers should compensate for the negative influence of family governance on tax aggressiveness with the positive effect of the family generations in order to obtain proper and balanced tax management that contributes to the sustainability of family firms.

This study contributes to the understanding of tax behavior heterogeneities among family firms by going further than most research (usually based mainly on comparative ownership aspects between large, publicly quoted family and non-family firms), considering some other more representative factors of family small and medium-sized enterprises, where the influence of characteristics of family management, family generation, and family values can be the main determinants of the firm taxation policies.

In this study, we investigated the dilemma of devising an operational family business definition in the SME context. The existing family business literature mostly agrees with the validity of a theoretical model called F-PEC, which identifies family businesses by evaluating three dimensions: power, experience, and culture. Nonetheless, empirical studies on family SMEs still use just one or a few elements with many different thresholds to operationally define family SMEs, highlighting an unsolved definitional divergence among scholars, which limits the possibility of investigating the potential effects of family attributes on firms’ goals, structures, processes, and performance.

Employing ancestry searching, online databases, and issue-by-issue searches from two decades (1990–2019), we analyzed 255 empirical studies that specified a family business’s operational definition (despite posing different research questions) and used a sample of small-sized and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Results showed ownership and governance/management are the most used elements in the operational definitions provided in the literature to date, but that there still is not a universally adopted operational definition of family SMEs in use today.

This paper is one of the first to comprehensively analyze and review the operationalized use of family SME definitions in the literature.

This chapter presents the current research status of family constitutions from an economics perspective. It locates the family constitution as part of the family and business governance structure of a family firm and the owner family. The typical structure and content of a family constitution are introduced. The chapter focuses on the status of research about family constitutions and provides a structured map for future research. With regard to extant research, it must be stated that the stock of literature is small. The contributions to literature are categorized in surveys; conceptual contributions; survey data; small sample, qualitative, empirical studies; and big sample, quantitative, empirical studies. The latter group includes three studies with a separate family constitution variable. This small number symbolizes that the family constitution still is an under-researched area. Therefore, family constitution research is far away from being able to answer central questions of advice-seeking owner families like, for example, whether a family constitution affects family performance, firm performance, or both; or whether the development process of a family constitutions disposes of an effect on family or firm performance separately from the hypothesized effect of the family constitution document.