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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 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.

This perspective paper explores ongoing research into stimuli that promote environmental responsibility in family business contexts. It also delineates emerging patterns and possible directions for future research within this domain.

The authors synthesise, critically assess and integrate existing research to make current thinking about the environmental responsibility of family businesses more accessible to a wide range of readers.

This paper offers a comprehensive overview of multifaceted triggers and sheds light on how they interact and influence the environmental performance of family businesses. The authors delve into family dynamics and values, examining how they enable a business to develop environmental responsibility practices. Simultaneously, the authors emphasise the importance of probing the impact of the macro environment within which family businesses operate, which either might incentivise or challenge their pursuit of environmental responsibility initiatives. The need to design a robust tool to measure the environmental consciousness of familiness, applicable to specific contextual settings, has been identified. Investigating how accounting and control systems act as supportive management tools to enhance the efficacy of overall corporate performance in family businesses is another area for future research. Moreover, examining these dynamics within the unique landscape of emerging economies offers a promising field of exploration.

This article consolidates existing research on the environmental responsibility of family businesses and puts forward potential avenues for future research.

When ownership starts getting dispersed among several individuals, families, branches, and generations, a need for organizing communications and decision-making usually arises to ensure functional relationships within the family. The need for a shared vision and mutually agreed ways of handling the shared ownership emerges, and a process for developing a family governance structure is often initiated. Family governance, hence, appears to be a central topic in family business research, but we still lack a more profound and specific understanding of how the owner family uses different family governance mechanisms to manage specific situations with possible conflicting goals, interests, and opinions, or just to develop the shared ownership further for or together with the next generation. The aim of this chapter is to give an overview and highlight different processes developed by the family within owner families with dispersed ownership to identify and align governance goals. This overview intends to broaden the understanding of what the role of family governance, as a family internal mechanism, can be in owner families with dispersed ownership among several family members.

Drawing on the stakeholder theory, the purpose of this study is to examine relationships between family identity, emotional attachment and binding social ties, and commitment of family firm owners to the family enterprise in the context of an emerging economy. Furthermore, this study examines whether the strength of the above relationships significantly vary between the founder generation and the subsequent generation of owners.

A set of hypotheses is tested by applying partial least squares structural equation modeling on a sample of 357 family-owned manufacturing companies in Bangladesh. Deploying SmartPLS (v. 3.2), the path model is analyzed through bootstrapping procedure. The moderating effect is tested through multigroup analysis.

The findings suggest that the relationships between emotional attachment and family identity and commitment are positive and significant, whereas the association between binding social ties and commitment was not significant. Furthermore, a multigroup analysis revealed that there is a significant difference between the founder generation and their next generation in terms of influence of binding social ties and family identity on commitment, whereas there appears to be no difference in terms of emotional attachment and commitment between the two generations.

This study shows that compared to the founder generation, the next generation prioritizes family identity and social bonds, which leads to greater levels of collective commitment to the organization. Such knowledge may provide clues to incumbent family-firm leaders by identifying the areas where they need to emphasize in generating greater levels of commitment among their successors.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this appears to be the first such study that provides a nuanced understanding of how family generation in control of the family firm influences the relationships between psychosocial components of socioemotional wealth and collective commitment of the owners of family firms in the context of an emerging economy.

The field of scientific research on small and medium-sized family businesses has been growing exponentially and the aim of this paper is to systematize the body of knowledge to develop an agenda for the future.

Adopting comparative bibliometric analyses on 155 articles (from 1989 until 2018) the authors provide a systematic assessment of the scientific research about small family firms, unveiling the structure and evolution of the field. Bibliographic coupling, co-citation analysis and co-occurrence analysis are adopted to identify the most influential studies and themes.

Four clusters of research are reviewed: succession in family SMEs, performances of family SMEs, internationalization of family SMEs and organizational culture of family SMEs.

This paper contributes to the field of family SMEs by providing a systematic analysis of the scientific knowledge. Reviewing those clusters allows to providing avenues and reflections for future research and further practice.

The purpose of this study seeks to examine how nonfamily employees' job autonomy and work passion can influence their job satisfaction and intention to quit in family small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Current, research regarding the determinants of nonfamily employees' job satisfaction and turnover intentions has largely focused on the effects of family influence and family firm characteristics. Accordingly, not much is known of how the job characteristics and emotions of nonfamily employees influence their job satisfaction and intention to quit.

Data were collected from 160 nonfamily employees across 28 family-SMEs. Process macro was used to analyze the mediating role of nonfamily employees' work passion in the relationship between their job autonomy and job satisfaction and intention to quit.

Findings showed that nonfamily employees' job autonomy only had a significant direct effects on their job satisfaction and not their intention to quit. Subsequently, nonfamily employees' work passion was found to only partially mediate the relationship between their job autonomy and job satisfaction.

By focusing on the concepts of job autonomy and work passion, the study adds additional insights about the drivers of nonfamily employees' pro-organizational attitudes in family-SMEs. Also the study represents one of the first efforts in the literature to establish a link between job autonomy and the work passion of nonfamily employees with respect to their job satisfaction.

This paper strives to understand the role of resource orchestration (RO) in the rapid growth of high-tech small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Based on a comparative case study, RO is compared between a high-tech family firm and a high-tech non-family firm. To capture the complexity of RO, this study applies a longitudinal approach using a large volume of archival and interview data gathered over ten years.

The configuration of family-firm paradoxical growth-oriented RO emphasizes RO based on collectivism and responsibility, although relying on large-scale conforming normative control. In contrast, the configuration of non-family-firm growth-oriented RO emphasizes administrative-based delegation and management-supported value creation.

By suggesting ownership-based RO configurations, this study provides insights into how ownership types, i.e. family firms and non-family firms, affect RO in firms operating in complex and dynamic environments. These configurations explain how and why RO is arranged in a growth context.

This study adopts the dynamic capabilities perspective to analyze environmental performance in family firms and explores the moderating effects that both family involvement in the Top Management Team (TMT) and long-term orientation (LTO) exert on the relationship between dynamic capabilities and environmental performance.

The authors test the hypotheses on a database of 748 family tourism firms, using hierarchical regression analysis.

The authors' results show that both variables have a beneficial effect on building the dynamic capabilities to be applied to improving environmental performance. However, the moderating effect of family involvement is revealed to be more complex than that of LTO. Having a high degree of family managerial involvement positively moderates the effect of dynamic capabilities on environmental performance but only in family firms with highly-developed dynamic capabilities; conversely, in family firms with lower levels of dynamic capabilities not having this family involvement in the TMT is better.

This study helps advance the research on Spanish family tourism firms by adopting an approach that unveils the heterogeneity in dynamic capabilities among said firms, driven by the firms' idiosyncratic features in terms of family involvement in the TMT and their LTO. The article also provides practical insights for family business owners, managers and advisors and outlines important directions for future research.