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Competent research methods and data analysis are essential components for the progression of family business research. To identify and evaluate empirical trends, and make suggestions for future research, we examine 319 empirical articles published in Family Business Review since 1988. These studies are compared with 146 family business research articles published in top-tier journals not dedicated to family business research over the same timeframe. While we substantiate growth in rigor and sophistication, we address specific family business research challenges regarding construct validity, generalizability, causality, temporality, and multilevel issues. Suggestions are provided for future empirical research across six major topical areas.

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ABSTRACT:Despite extensive research on organizational virtue, our understanding about factors that promote virtue within organizations remains unclear. Drawing on upper echelon theory, we examine the relationship between five top management team (TMT) characteristics and organizational virtue orientation (OVO)—the integrated set of values and beliefs that support ethical traits and virtuous behaviors of an organization. Specifically, we utilize prospectuses of initial public offering (IPO) firms and 10-K post-IPO filings to explore how TMT composition with respect to member age, tenure, education, functional background, and gender influences OVO. Additionally, we examine the moderating effects of organizational size, and argue that the more expansive structures and processes associated with larger organizations diminish the main relationships. Our findings, using two sources of data, are consistent, but somewhat mixed in their support for our hypotheses. Overall, TMT characteristics do appear to influence OVO, but in more complex and counterintuitive ways than initially expected.

Ventures are often hesitant to accept corporate venture capital due to concerns of intellectual property misappropriation. This is likely to be especially true with startup stage ventures operating in weak intellectual property rights regimes. Drawing on transaction costs economics and game theory, we examine how corporate investors might alleviate concerns of misappropriation by establishing credible commitments to their corporate venture capital program, which discourages opportunistic behavior. We submit that corporate investors can demonstrate credible commitments through prior investment quantity and prior investment continuity, therefore increasing the chances of forming a corporate venture capital–venture investment relationship. Our findings—using data from 11,136 ventures, 300 corporate venture capital investors, and 1782 investments across 18 years—demonstrate that ventures are more likely to pair with corporate venture capital investors that have made a credible commitment to their corporate venture capital program. Also, we find evidence that both quantity and continuity possess an enhanced effect on alleviating fears of misappropriation when a startup venture operates in the same industry as a potential corporate venture capital partner; this is because the corporate venture capital investor possesses both the absorptive capacity to understand the venture’s intellectual property and complementary capabilities to beat them to market.