This paper offers a review of the theoretical and empirical literature addressing boards of directors within the unique organizational setting of family businesses. By reviewing and structuring past research, this paper aims to improve the understanding of how family involvement in firms affects the roles and behaviours of boards. The review of the literature is structured according to the family business board's two primary tasks as an internal administrative body, namely the exercise of control and the provision of advice. For both board tasks, theoretical perspectives and the match between theory and empirical findings will be discussed. The review concludes by offering an integrative discussion of the relevant theories and by highlighting the need for multi-theoretic, process and contextualized approaches in future research on boards of directors in family businesses.

This study investigates differences in the diversity of cooperation partners used for innovation‐related activities (i.e., search breadth) between family and nonfamily small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), as well as within the group of family SMEs. The results generally confirm our hypotheses derived from the behavioral theory of the firm. Specifically, we show that family SMEs have a lower search breadth than their nonfamily counterparts. Our findings further illustrate how attributes of the CEO (level of education) and the top management team (nonfamily management involvement and educational background diversity) relate to the search breadth of family SMEs.

The purpose of this study is to advance the understanding of boards of directors in family firms. Building on generational changes in family attributes, we argue that firms in a different generational phase have different governance needs and characteristics. With regard to board task needs, the empirical results indicate a convex generational evolution in the need for board advice, and a rise over the generations in the need for board control. With regard to board composition, we find that the likelihood of having an outside director on the board has a convex generational trend. This relationship seems to be fully mediated by the firm's board task needs. Furthermore, the number of family directors seems to increase over the generations. This study demonstrates that it is important to consider the generational phase of the family firm in order to understand its governance system.

This study builds on the idea that family businesses perform particularly well in the domain of exploitative innovations and explores a possible source of this strength, namely their employees’ spontaneous involvement in informal innovation activity. Specifically, we develop a mediation model on the interrelationship between family business employment and employees’ innovative work involvement. Analyses are based on a sample of 893 Belgian employees using structural equation modeling. Results suggest that family business employment is positively associated with employees’ innovative work involvement, and that part of this relationship can be attributed to their heightened perceptions of organizational support and work motivation.

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Prior research has revealed a negative association between family influence and R&D spending. The dominant explanation for this association centers on the role of socioemotional considerations in decision-making. These socioemotional decision considerations are argued to play a more prominent role among family firms and to lower their R&D spending intensity. However, to date, this negative explanatory mechanism has not been empirically verified. Moreover, a deeper analysis of the literature suggests that some family-induced socioemotional considerations may actually stimulate R&D investments. In this study, four socioemotional decision considerations are delineated-namely, concern for current control, for extended preservation, for organizational reputation, and for organizational values and traditions-of which the first two are anchored in a family's nurturer role identity and the latter two in a family's organizational identification. It is hypothesized that those socioemotional considerations derived from a family's nurturer role identity constrain R&D spending, while those derived from the family's organizational identification boost R&D spending. The empirical study concentrates on the setting of privately held manufacturing SMEs, and using survey data on 365 such companies in the Netherlands, a structural equation model is estimated. The analyses reveal several interesting results: (1) the overall association between family firm status and R&D spending indeed turns out to be negative, and this negative effect is fully explained by family firms' preoccupation with extended preservation; (2) concerns for organizational reputation and for organizational values and traditions partly compensate the negative effect of the extended preservation mechanism. Key academic and practical implications of these findings are discussed. Practitioner PointsFamily-owned SMEs on average invest less in R&D than nonfamily SMEs.The greater concern of owning-families for the extended preservation of their firm largely explains these lower investments in R&D. On the other hand, family owners' greater concern for organizational reputation, as well as for organizational values and traditions provides some incentive towards an increase of R&D spending.Firm decision-makers and advisors, as well as policy makers, should thus be aware that family-induced socioemotional considerations represent a doubleedged sword in relation to R&D spending decisions.Rather than trying to suppress such socioemotional considerations without discrimination, from an R&D perspective some of these considerations should be carefully monitored whilst others can be nurtured and stimulated.

Societal pressures for greater sustainability can encourage firms to target part of their innovation activities at ecological initiatives (i.e., eco-innovation). Yet, depending on their value function, firms can respond differently to such pressures and exhibit variance in their eco-innovation activities. In this paper, we investigate the idea that a firm's ownership structure may play a significant role in determining its engagement in eco-innovation. Specifically, we propose that ownership by family blockholders increases the value attached to the company's reputation and that this, in turn, stimulates higher levels of eco-innovation. In other words, we model the company reputation motive as a key mediator in the relationship between family ownership and firm-level eco-innovation. To account for family firm heterogeneity, we also model the moderating role of owners' intention to pass the business on to the next family generation (transgenerational intentions) and of the extent to which these owners reside in the firm's local community (local embeddedness). As theoretical backdrop, our study builds on institutional theory and the mixed gamble logic. To test our hypotheses, we use a large sample of German firms and nonlinear moderated mediation regression analysis. Results reveal that family ownership is positively related to the introduction of eco-innovations by firms, in part because of the stronger emphasis being placed on the company's reputation. We find that this effect is strongest when the owning-family has transgenerational intentions. As such, this study advances our understanding of firmlevel drivers of eco-innovation. In view of the prevalence of family-owned firms and the mounting importance of ecological sustainability, it is valuable to extend knowledge on the contingent and indirect effect of family ownership on eco-innovation. Practitioner Points • The ownership structure of a company shapes the governance framework within which managers can make decisions on ecological innovation.

In the slipstream of several large-scale corporate scandals, the board of directors has gained a pivotal position in the corporate governance debate. However, due to an overreliance on particular methodological (i.e. inputoutput studies) and theoretical (i.e. agency theory) research fortresses in past board research, academic knowledge concerning how this important governance mechanism actually operates and functions remains relatively limited. This theoretical paper aims to contribute to the promising stream of research which focuses on behavioural perspectives and processes within the corporate board, by delving into one of the research areas perhaps plagued most by these predominant approaches: board leadership. In adopting a team perspective on the board of directors our study goes beyond traditional board leadership research, which has turned a blind eye on actual leadership dynamics, by examining leadership processes and behaviours inside the board team. Specifically, we develop a conceptual framework addressing a novel and ethical approach to team leadership within the board, i.e. shared leadership, which has previously been demonstrated to result in performance benefits in various other team settings.