Family Firm Configurations for High Performance: The Role of Entrepreneurship and Ambidexterity

The performance drivers of family firms have spawned considerable research interest. Almost exclusively this research has relied on independent sets of explanatory variables in linear analyses. These analyses mask the complex interdependencies that are likely to exist among key success factors, lead...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:British journal of management 2018-10, Vol.29 (4), p.595-612
Main Authors: Hughes, Mathew, Filser, Matthias, Harms, Rainer, Kraus, Sascha, Chang, Man‐Ling, Cheng, Cheng‐Feng
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Companies
Comparative analysis
Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurship
Exploitation
Family owned businesses
Fuzzy sets
Handedness
Innovations
Linear analysis
Organizational performance
Strategic management
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Summary:The performance drivers of family firms have spawned considerable research interest. Almost exclusively this research has relied on independent sets of explanatory variables in linear analyses. These analyses mask the complex interdependencies that are likely to exist among key success factors, leading to faulty theory and misspecified implications for practice. As treatment, the authors propose a configuration approach to family firm performance that accounts for complex interdependencies among entrepreneurial, innovation and family influence conditions. Using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis of a sample of 129 Finnish family firms, the authors identify sufficient conditions with regard to the existence or absence of antecedent conditions to family firm performance. These conditions include entrepreneurial orientation, exploration and exploitation activities that form causal paths towards family firm performance. To enrich the analysis, the authors theorize and empirically analyse how these conditions might differ in family firms with high and low levels of family influence. They deepen the current understanding of configurations that promote the performance of family firms, offer important implications for theory and practice, and set new directions for future research on the strategic management of family firms. The results are also virtually identical and insensitive to change across subjective and objective performance measures.
ISSN:1045-3172
1467-8551
DOI:10.1111/1467-8551.12263