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Small and medium-sized firms are a prevalent organizational form in Germany. Their importance for the German economy is indisputable. Most of them are global market leaders in their niches and are considered to be a force for innovation in the German economy. The ability to be innovative in niche markets has been identified as the antecedent of their strong, or even dominant, competitive positions in their industries. The driver of this innovation success may well be the family, which distinguishes family firms from non-family firms. But how can a family influence innovation in a family firm and does this influence have only positive effects? This dissertation focuses on the impact of top management teams on innovations interacting with family firm-specific characteristics.
The Routledge Companion to Family Business offers a definitive survey of a field that has seen rapid growth in research in recent years. Edited by leading scholars with contributions from the top minds in family business from around the world, this volume provides researchers and scholars with a comprehensive understanding of the state of the discipline. Over 25 chapters address a wide variety of subjects, providing readers with a thorough review of the key research themes in the modern family firm, such as corporate social responsibility and bank debt rationing. International examples cover a wide range of economies including China, Europe, and Latin America. The book will appeal to undergraduates, postgraduates and business instructors seeking a definitive view of the issues and solutions that affect and support family business.
Sandra Wolf develops a better understanding of the importance of clearly communicating family influence. She examines the efficacy of brand elements that signal family influence and that help external stakeholders to identify a family firm. An experiment with 543 students in Germany and Switzerland is carried out to empirically test the derived hypothesis. The results highlight two important findings. Firstly, the importance of a family firm tagline as well as the family name as brand elements are able to signal "family firm" and this helps potential employees to immediately categorize the potential employer. Secondly, a positive relationship between the identification of a family firm and applicant attraction was confirmed as to that the relationship is serially mediated by perceived brand authenticity and perceived benevolence.
Since the pioneering work scholars such as Joseph Schumpeter and Peter Drucker, the fields of innovation and entrepreneurship have evolved to become two separate and distinct disciplines. Schumpeter 1 focused on the contributions of entrepreneurial startups and smaller firms, whereas Schumpeter 2 emphasized the role of formal research, development and industrial innovation in larger firms. Unfortunately, the study and practice of each field has suffered as a result: entrepreneurship has become preoccupied with individual entrepreneurs and small business creation, and innovation is dominated by corporate R&D and new product development.Promoting Innovation in New Ventures and Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) aims to bridge these two fields by examining innovation in new ventures and SMEs. This book identifies themes which can reunite the study and practice of entrepreneurship and innovation by examining a potentially bridging phenomenon. The focus here is on high growth, innovative SMEs, and the interactions between SMEs and larger organizations, private and public. It is organized around three overlapping themes: SME innovation performance, practices and networks.
Thomas Wittig aims at gaining additional insights into the crisis and turnaround process of SMEs, investigating both, the turnaround success and the impact of turnaround on the family role in family firms. Based on a specifically developed integrated conceptual turnaround model, the author collected a sample of 209 turnaround cases of German medium-sized companies from restructuring experts working for German banks. Employing a variety of carefully selected statistical analyses he identifies key factors for turnaround success and finds specific archetypes of crises and turnaround. The study concludes with an analysis of the impact of a successful turnaround on the family firms within his sample. Based on the study’s insights he provides both, recommendations for future research and a set of practical implications for all relevant stakeholders of a turnaround situation.
This edited collection draws together cutting edge perspectives from leading scholars on the increasingly prominent discussion of entrepreneurial behaviour. Exploring various aspects of human behaviour, the authors analyse the antecedent influences and drivers of entrepreneurial behaviour in different organisational settings. This collection is of interest to scholars, practitioners and even policy-makers, as a result of its in-depth exploration, discussion and evaluation of emerging themes of entrepreneurial behaviour within the field of entrepreneurship and beyond. Offering contextual examples from universities, firms and society, Entrepreneurial Behaviour covers topics such as entrepreneurial intention, gender, crime, effectuation and teamwork.
Both practitioners and scholars agree that organizations that are ready to cope with crisis should be better able to manage it than organizations which are not prepared. As, due to their company characteristics, family businesses are exposed to additional causes of crisis beyond the usual causes all companies face, preparing for crisis is of specific importance to them. Based on empirical investigations, Pedram Faghfouri shows that non-family businesses are more likely to prepare for crisis when compared to family businesses. The author’s findings let further suggest that the existence of a supervisory board has a positive effect on the degree of crisis readiness of a family business. Moreover, in family businesses with supervisory boards, the involvement of family members in the top management team seems to have a negative effect on the degree of crisis readiness.
Margarete Rosina investigates whether it makes sense for family firms to communicate their family firm status to consumers. To do so, she conducts two experimental studies using a sample of 349 consumers. Using a branding perspective, the first study looks at whether consumers perceive family firm brands as more authentic and why and how this influences their buying behavior. The second study applies a consumer happiness perspective and investigates whether family firms signal prosocial behaviors related to “doing good”, namely being a good employer and socially responsible, and whether this, in turn, leads to higher levels of consumer happiness when buying from family firms. Both studies indicate that the family firm status can be of strategic value for family firms.
Jörg Schäfer investigates the influence of family firm specific decision rationales based on socioemotional wealth on vertical and horizontal pay ranges in family firms. Building on a primary data set of over 200 family firms in Germany and applying multiple regression analysis techniques, as well as, the firm conceptual foundation in family firm and compensation theory, the presented study provides answers regarding antecedents of pay variation, and the factors that drive different family firms to pursue and implement specific pay structures and pay variations. Furthermore, the dissertation contributes to the current research discussions, by partially validating the FIBER scale, proving the heterogeneity of family firms and adding robustness to methodology and range measures in the compensation context.
Annika Geyer aims to advance the current understanding of variations in family businesses' growth performance and to explain their potential origins. She focuses on the respective impact of the set of relevant background factors (stemming from top executives' individual characteristics as well as the given organizational and social environment) on the firms growth performance and the underlying processes through which this impact is transmitted. The insights of this work constitute an essential step towards settling the debate on how the family actually contributes to the family firm's performance and hold some important implications for practitioners.