Search results

The role of family business staffing practices in their ultimate success remains largely unknown. The purpose of this paper is to test the notion that firms with greater family essence manifest their commitment by leveraging referrals as a recruitment source, which in turn is associated with higher performance. The hypothesized model posits that reduced agency costs from hiring through owner referral utilization (ORU) provide high-family essence firms with stronger performance.

The study draws upon a sample of 194 small and medium-sized family business owners.

Findings from OLS regression and the PROCESS model in SPSS support the hypothesis that recruiting nonfamily employees from referrals helps lessen agency conflicts and serves as an intervening mechanism in the relationship between family firm essence and firm performance.

This study draws on agency theory to shed light on how family firms successfully bring nonfamily employees into the fold despite their human resource limitations. The results extend theory on family businesses by demonstrating that those with higher degrees of family essence are more likely to attract applicants via ORU. Leveraging this recruiting practice allows family businesses to hire nonfamily employees who share the values and goals of the family firm, thus lowering agency costs and fostering higher performance. More broadly, the findings offer insight into the role of staffing practices in family firm success.

Research suggests family businesses often pursue risky or aggressive strategies despite the desire to preserve socioemotional wealth (SEW), which is thought to lead to conservativism in family firm strategic decision making. The purpose of this paper is to resolve this apparent contradiction by presenting a model that describes the screening criteria used by family business decision-makers when evaluating strategic opportunities.

The conceptual model relies on insights derived from image theory to resolve apparent contradictions inherent in the SEW perspective’s implications for family firms’ risky strategic decisions.

The proposed model suggests new strategic opportunities in family firms are evaluated through an unconscious, schema-driven decision process and that the preservation of SEW does not preclude risky strategic directions, but instead serves as an unconscious screening criteria for strategic opportunities.

This paper contributes to the literature by expanding the understanding of family-firm strategic decision-making to include considerations of the decision’s fit with the family’s principles, goals and strategic plan rather than solely to overall risk to SEW. Thus, the paper presents a detailed model of family-firm strategic decision-making that relies on insights from image theory.

The flow of human capital into and out of organizations is a crucial aspect of organizational functioning, yet the bulk of the theory and research adopts a US-centric perspective. The purpose of this edited volume is for scholars embedded in contexts around the world to describe the relevance and implications (or lack thereof) of turnover theories in their particular context. We take a broad view of talent, focusing on the departure of human capital in general without necessarily restricting the analysis to those who disproportionately contribute to organizational success, and the authors focus on institutional contexts and culture because of their role in shaping employee norms and behaviors. We partnered with author teams embedded in countries and regions with a focus on capturing variance in contexts across the GLOBE clusters: Anglo (England), Confucian Asian (China; South Korea), Eastern European (Bulgaria), Germanic European (Germany), Latin American (Mexico), Latin European (Spain), Middle Eastern (Turkey), Nordic European (Denmark), Southern Asian (India), and Sub-Saharan African (South Africa). We provided each author team discretion to express their own voice, while also providing a common set of goals across chapters for consistency of contribution: a description of the institutional, legal, and cultural context as it relates to employee mobility, a review of context-specific research literature leading to a description of how the mechanisms and processes in prominent turnover theories may operate differently in a particular context, and implications for research and practice related to talent turnover and retention. Considering the contributions as a set, we identify important themes and overarching recommendations for scholars interested in studying employee retention and turnover around the globe.

Human resource management is an understudied but burgeoning topic in the family business scholarly domain. This chapter provides a summary review of the existing literature on human resource management in family businesses and offers pathways for future research. The authors cluster the extant research into topic areas of compensation, recruitment and selection, training, employee performance, and turnover, and offer future research directions for each. In identifying gaps and tension in the literature, the chapter also highlights several broader theoretical pathways for future research. These opportunities include further inquiry into the outcomes of bifurcation bias, or the disparate treatment between family and non-family employees, the nuanced ways family firms recruit and select new employees, the role of high-performance work systems in family firms, the ways image considerations influence human resource practices in family firms, and the application of social network perspectives.

In this chapter, the authors build on the voluntary turnover model posited by Allen, Bryant, and Vardaman (2010) with reference to turnover and retention within the United Kingdom. After providing important contextual material about the United Kingdom, the authors explore turnover drivers such as work precarity, as well as the effect of Brexit, which compounds the political and economic uncertainty engendered by the pandemic. Reflecting on the role of external shocks in precipitating withdrawal processes, the authors go on to examine the extent to which job embeddedness impacts on employee turnover, and how alternative opportunities in a UK context may shape the decisions people make to stay with or leave their organizations. Central to our argument is that human resource (HR) practices as perceived by employees play a critical role in shaping attitudes such that people wish to stay in the organization. Cultural values posited by Hofstede and others are likely to significantly impact the way in which employees respond to the HR practices they perceive. Hence, leaders and HR specialists in the United Kingdom need to deploy HR practices which speak to cultural values that stand out in that context, considering that the United Kingdom is characterized by relatively low levels of power distance, low uncertainty avoidance, high individualism and higher than average indulgence.

Taken together, the model provides an overview of key internal and external factors that influence employees’ attitudes at work, their withdrawal behaviors and the ensuing turnover at the organizational-level. The authors conclude by highlighting key research questions raised by the analysis of the model within a UK context, considering where empirical research will add to understanding about turnover and retention in the United Kingdom.

The authors review the German voluntary turnover literature and examine how it reflects and extends the overall knowledge of employee turnover. First, the authors describe legal, institutional, and cultural influences specific to Germany that may affect voluntary turnover and its relationships with antecedents and outcomes. The authors then explain how research paradigms, which in German turnover research are primarily embedded in sociology and labor economics and to a lesser degree psychology and management, affect the lens by which voluntary turnover is examined. For instance, the variety of research perspectives leads to a variety of research questions, theories, data, and methodological approaches. Using these diverse perspectives, the authors explain how measurement and data quality concerns may hamper the understanding of turnover in cross-country/cross-cultural comparisons. This review further reveals many similarities with US-based turnover research, regarding the theories, methods, and results. The authors also find that turnover levels are, on average, considerably lower in Germany than in Anglo-Saxon labor markets. The authors suggest that the industry structure in Germany, coined by its strong and traditionally organized “Mittelstand” companies, may partly drive these findings. The authors close by identifying several research opportunities, available through advances in technology to improve the matching process, nonstandard work arrangements (such as in the gig economy), and a broader perspective on institutional peculiarities.

The authors provide a comprehensive review of existing turnover studies in Spain. The literature review reveals that research on voluntary turnover is scarce, while other types of mobility, such as involuntary separations, downsizing, and planned turnover through contract date expiration, have received substantial attention. The authors identify the main institutional characteristics of Spain and explain why these may contribute to the low incidence of voluntary turnover. Specifically, the authors note that employment protection legislation, high unemployment, high unemployment insurance, centralized collective bargaining, the composition of the sector, high power distance, and in-group collectivism are important drivers of the patterns observed in existing turnover studies. The authors also explore how some of the mechanisms and processes exposed by key turnover theories may be applicable to the Spanish context. This chapter highlights the importance of paying attention to the role of the institutional and cultural context to understand different mobility patterns in the labor market. The authors also suggest several avenues for future research including the study of different turnover types, employer and employee outcomes, cultural variations, and employment practices.

Why employees stay or leave their organization in Republic of Korea (South Korea) can be better understood by taking into account the idiosyncratic institutional and cultural contexts. In this chapter, we aim to provide a comprehensive review of employee turnover research in South Korea and discuss its implications for research. Specifically, we explain how employee turnover decisions may be affected by the characteristics of South Korean labor market (duality, polarization, and intergenerational issues) and cultural environments (collectivism, high power distance, and high-performance orientation). The review shows that organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and on-the-job embeddedness are three key mechanisms explaining employee turnover in South Korea. Building upon the review, we conclude the review by suggesting future research directions: (a) examining turnover behavior as a key outcome, (b) developing a theoretical framework for social identity and embeddedness, and (c) understanding intergenerational issues.

The overall goal of this chapter is twofold. First, the authors aim to identify indigenous phenomena that influence employee turnover and retention in the Chinese context. Second, the authors link these phenomena to the contextualization of job embeddedness theory. To achieve the goal, the authors begin by introducing three macro-level forces (i.e., political, economic, and cultural forces) in China that help scholars analyze contextual issues in turnover studies. The authors then provide findings in the literature research on employee retention studies published in Chinese academic journals. Next, the authors discuss six indigenous phenomena (i.e., hukou, community in China, migrant workers, state-owned companies, family benefit prioritization, and guanxi) under the three macro-level forces and offer exploratory propositions illustrating how these phenomena contribute to understanding employee retention in China. Finally, the authors offer suggestions on how contextualized turnover studies shall be conducted in China.