Suchergebnisse

This article represents a call to family scholars for help in examining the effects of business ownership on families. To demonstrate the importance of this call, we illustrate the extent to which new venture creation is encouraged by policymakers and estimate the number of families engaged in entrepreneurial activity around the globe. We then summarize emergent critiques questioning the glorification of entrepreneurship in general and review the limited body of scholarly work examining the effects on families in particular. We conclude by outlining potential research agendas for several domains of family scholarship, providing examples of the provocative questions that arise when business ownership is explicitly acknowledged as a factor likely to impact family dynamics and well‐being.

This conceptual article seeks to address the heterogeneity of family firms in terms of their innovativeness by investigating business family communication dynamics. We use the established family communication constructs of conversation and conformity orientations to develop a typology of family firms in terms of innovativeness. We provide empirically testable propositions and present possible operationalizations for future research. In particular, we argue that supportive business families (i.e., families characterized by high conversation orientation and moderate conformity orientation) are associated with the highest levels of innovativeness in the family‐controlled firm. Through this article we hope to deepen our understanding of the relationship between family and firm levels of analysis, to develop a stronger bond between communication and innovative behavior, and to identify family‐related antecedents of heterogeneity in family firm innovativeness.