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The purpose of this research is to examine the interplay between family commitment as a family-centric resource and professionalization of the organization as a firm-centric resource to determine how the two phenomenon come together to enhance business performance in the context of privately held family firms.

Deploying the theoretical lens offered by the resource-based view, a conceptual link is developed between family commitment to the firm and firm performance with the potential moderating influence of firm professionalization. The hypotheses are tested using data collected from 357 privately held medium-to-large family-owned manufacturing companies in Bangladesh. The data are analyzed through structural equation modeling using SmartPLS (v.3.2).

The data analysis suggests that in absence of the moderator; professionalization, family commitment has a positive and significant association with firm performance. While in the presence of the moderator the above relationship is substantially stronger. The findings indicate that when family-specific resources and firm-specific resources are synchronized, it enhances performance of the family firm and puts it on a strong economic footing toward a more sustainable future.

Cross-sectional nature of the study exposes it to the specter of common method bias despite the fact that procedural remedies were initiated to minimize the impact of such occurrence. Furthermore, data were collected from a single individual in each organization. Therefore, a longitudinal study with data obtained from multiple individuals at different levels of the organization would possibly yield more robust findings.

Leaders of family firms may find pertinent clues from the outcome of this study. Particularly, the confluence of family commitment to the firm as a family-specific resource and professionalization as a firm-specific resource can be valuable, rare, difficult to imitate and substitute source of competitive advantage for the family business organization.

Survival of family businesses is vital to the global economy as one of the primary drivers of global gross domestic product growth and source of new employment. Policymakers can benefit from the findings of this study to customize policies to nurture growth of family enterprises and incentivize family firms to adopt professionalization through better governance and transparent managerial procedures.

A nuanced understanding of how family commitment and firm professionalization combine to significantly improve performance of family firms has not been dominant in the literature. Therefore, findings of this study carry special theoretical implications, because it suggests that both family-specific features and firm-specific features are necessary for enhanced levels of firm-centric business outcomes such as economic performance.

The study provides the emergence and evolution of the socioemotional wealth (SEW) concept in the family business field from 2007 (the inception date) until 2021. To provide a better overview of this notion, the study unfolds a deeper understanding of this term throughout the systematic literature review (SLR).

The study applies a systematic literature review (SLR) by analyzing the sample of 185SEW articles extracted from the Scopus database. To identify all relevant studies, the article selection process was carefully designed and divided into two phases with clear steps: identification of studies via databases and identification of studies via previous studies' reference lists. Selected studies were analyzed using the Bibliometrix R-tool, resulting in an analysis of the evolution of the trends in the SEW literature, citation analysis, and network analysis. Finally, this SLR included the content analysis of the 25 most-cited SEW articles.

The study provides a relevant and comprehensive overview facilitating empirical and theoretical research in this field and paving the way to develop new themes. The bottom line of the important findings is that the SEW concept is relatively new, alluding to a wealthy venue for future works. Other results and implications are discussed on the family business and SEW theme. Additionally, the study provides suggestions which could be used for future works in this area.

This is the first article related to the SEW concept in the family business. It portrays a clear picture of this field, providing relevant information on what has been done, as well as what the future possibilities are that might bode the future horizons in family businesses.

The purpose of this paper is to enhance the existing socioemotional wealth (SEW) theory. Particularly, the current research proposes a dynamic SEW model using insights from prospect theory. The application of the proposed dynamic SEW model leads to several propositions that will reveal the relationship amongst family business, transgenerational succession, business risks and diversification strategy.

This study is mainly a theoretical research. A dynamic SEW model is proposed in which the SEW is not static and can be increasing or decreasing. SEW is framed as a gain or loss under different scenarios, and the shift in reference point will change the framing or value of SEW.

The current research presents several interesting propositions based on the dynamic SEW model. Generally, family firms are less likely to diversify than non-family firms. However, when family firms face business risks, they are more likely to diversify than those that do not face business risks. Family firms with second generation involvement in management are more likely to diversify than those without second generation involvement. The dynamic SEW model can also be applied to analyse R&D and IPO underpricing for family firms.

This study builds a dynamic SEW model, which is totally new to the literature. The conceptual framework that reveals the relationships amongst family business, transgenerational succession, business risks and diversification strategy also contributes to the literature and has empirical implications to researchers, policy makers and family business owners.

There is a growing consensus that entrepreneurial activity is essentially a collective family endeavour, with some configuration of family involvement in business (FIB) working better than others. This paper aims to examine the effects of FIB on strategy and financial performance (FP), drawing from the institutional theory for the Indian family businesses.

The sample comprises of 105 pharmaceutical companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange for FY2013–2017. A two-way random effects panel model was invoked to examine the relationship between FIB and strategy, as well as the intermediating effect that strategy has on the FIB-FP link.

On average, the family has a high ownership concentration, with the founders predominantly holding the chief executive officer (CEO) and chair positions. The econometric results highlight that the founder’s descendants adopt a conservative strategy. A significant positive moderating effect of strategy on FIB-FP link was observed for the descendants as the largest owners, CEO and board chair. The presence of a professional CEO and independent chair, however, leads to an intervening adverse impact on FP. The ownership-management-governance configurations highlight that some combinations of family and non-FIB leads to better performance than others.

The study provides a plausible explanation for the conflicting evidence on the direct FIB-FP relationship through the strategy intermediation. The institutional perspective emphasizing the identity and role family members play in terms of strategy provides an unconventional epistemological underpinning to the present research.

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.

Scholars and practitioners agree that governance practices are at the core of what differentiates family firms from other forms of business. Yet, there is a lack of consensus in the extant literature about how and the extent to which family governance affects firm performance. This study aims to address the matter by taking a more comprehensive unified systems perspective to explore the pathways through which variations in family governance mechanisms simultaneously affect both the business and the family system.

This study utilises a global dataset sourced from a survey and structural equation modelling to empirically measure several intermediate and final outcomes of family governance.

This study finds that the use of family protocols, as well as formal and informal meetings, have positive effects on the functioning of the family, whereas family involvement in the top management team diminishes the firm's competitive advantage. In turn, this study demonstrates that both family functioning and competitive advantage are positively related to firm performance.

By taking into consideration the complexity of the family and business systems, and measuring their interlinkages, this study advances knowledge by providing a more complete picture of the family governance/firm performance relationship.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are indispensable tools for Knowledge Management (KM) practices in today’s knowledge-intensive and globally interconnected marketplace. This paper seeks to investigate the impact of family ownership on ICT investments in an emerging economy (EE) context.

This empirical paper uses data from 300 large Indian listed firms with 2,650 observations in the period 2008–2017, to test its hypothesis.

The results indicate that family firms are not favourably inclined towards ICT investments for formalizing their KM practices. However, under certain contexts, such as higher foreign institutional ownership or business group affiliation, they are more willing to invest in ICT resources.

This study establishes a nuanced understanding of how family firms approach ICT investments and KM practices. This research can help family owners/managers to commit sufficient resources on ICT projects.

Literature on KM has largely emanated from developed countries. This is one of the first papers from an EE context that studies the impact of family ownership on ICT investments and subsequent KM practices. In this way, this paper offers specific insights into the context of Indian family firms and offers some interesting findings that can contribute to the literature, policy and practice.

The purpose of this study is to investigate R&D investments in family firms.

The socio-emotional wealth (SEW) perspective, considered as a dominant paradigm in the family business field, is the theoretical framework used to report different behaviors ascertained within family firms. This paper focuses on two dimensions of the SEW, namely, family control and influence and family identity. A suspected moderating role played by the firm’s life cycle stage on the dimensions is also investigated using panel data. To analyze the results, this paper uses the Smart PLS software on secondary data collected for 76 German family firms.

The empirical results reveal a negative influence of SEW on R&D investments. The prominent effect of the family control and influence dimension on R&D is higher in the first part of a firm life cycle.

The analysis of this study is subject to several caveats. First, to measure the R&D investment, this paper used R&D intensity computed as the total annual R&D expenses by total sales. Except for the fact that the use of proxies received several criticizes from scholars (Berrone et al., 2012) claiming how they do not directly relate to the essence of the dimensions measured. Second, this paper used two out of five FIBER dimensions only in the study. This paper took the right direction, but still, the complexity of SEW may not be fully captured following this approach (Berrone et al., 2012).

This study could be considered as an important extension of prior research investigating R&D in family firms. The authors provide a valid empirical construct, the FIBER scale, to capture non-monotonic behaviors in family firms and an enlargement of the family firms and innovation management field of research.

Based on the socio-emotional wealth and agency theories, this study empirically investigates the impact of family ownership and management on green innovation (GI) in family businesses, as well as the moderating effects of institutional environmental support factors, namely, the technological achievement marketisation index and the market-rule-of law index.

This study empirically tests the hypotheses based on a sample of listed Chinese family companies with A-shares in 14 heavily polluting industries from 2009 to 2019.

There is a U-shaped relationship between the percentage of family ownership and GI, and an inverted U-shaped relationship between the degree of family management and GI. Additionally, different institutional environmental support factors affect these relationships in different ways. As the technological achievement marketisation index increases, the U-shaped relationship between the percentage of family ownership and GI becomes steeper, while the inverted U-shaped relationship between the degree of family management and GI becomes smoother. The market rule-of-law index weakens the U-shaped relationship between family ownership and GI.

First, the authors enrich the research on the driving factors of GI from the perspective of the most essential heterogeneity of family businesses. This study shows nonlinear and opposite effects of family ownership and management on GI in family firms. Second, this study contributes to the literature on family firm innovation. GI, not considered by researchers, is regarded as an important deficiency in research on innovation in family businesses. Therefore, this study fills that gap. Third, the study expands research on moderating effects in the literature on GI from the perspective of institutional environmental support factors.

Extant literature is ambiguous on the corporate social performance (CSP) of family firm. This paper aims to synthesize existing evidence of the relationship between family firm and corporate responsibility performance, and to examine the moderating effects of national culture.

The paper is based on a meta-analysis of the relationship between family firm and CSP, as well as the role of national culture on shaping this relationship.

The findings show evidence of greater CSP among family firms compared to nonfamily firms. The family firm–CSP relationship was moderated by cultural values such as ingroup collectivism, humane orientation and future orientation, and the moderating effects depended on cultural tightness.

The results help reconcile inconclusive prior findings, and elucidates family firms' corporate social responsibility in different cultures.