The Natural Environment, Innovation, and Firm Performance: A Comparative Study

Abstract

In this article, we investigate the effect of firm‐level natural‐environment‐related policies on innovation and financial performance in family and nonfamily firms. Our findings demonstrate that family firms are better able to facilitate environmentally friendly firm policies associated with improved firm innovation and greater financial performance more effectively than their nonfamily competitors.

Are Family Firms Good Employers?

“…In contrast, the notion that stewardship prevails in family firms was primarily tested using cross-sectional surveys of small to medium-sized private firms (Craig & Dibrell, 2006;Eddleston et al, 2012;Zahra, 2003). This stream of stewardship research tends to focus on organizational and strategic dimensions of family firm conduct and relies on subjective measures like commitment (Vallejo, 2009), corporate entrepreneurship (Eddleston et al, 2012), organizational climate (Neubaum et al, 2017), strategic flexibility (Zahra et al, 2008), innovativeness (Craig & Dibrell, 2006), and entrepreneurial behavior of employees (Sieger, Zellweger, & Aquino, 2013). As a result, Neubaum et al (2017) argue that past stewardship research has been overly reliant on measures that capture only a subset of potential variables that stewardship might influence.…”

Examining the Impact of Family Management on Patent Applications for German Industrial Firms

“…However, other authors state in contrast that family-owned businesses invest more in R&D projects (Kim et al 2008;Tribo et al 2007). Moreover, further empirical findings show that family-owned businesses have better abilities in leveraging their capabilities into innovative outcomes (Craig and Dibrell, 2006) and demonstrate higher organizational innovativeness (Dibrell and Moeller, 2011) relative to non-family businesses.…”

“…As Jell et al (2015) stated "family managers are more likely than non-family managers to introduce management processes that are long-term oriented and help the firm to survive as a family firm across generations," (p.186). Being partly independent of performancebased evaluations and keeping long-term development objectives of the business in mind (Craig and Dibrell, 2006), stewards are more willing to invest in long-run research and development projects. We thus conclude that the number of applied patents should be lower in family-managed businesses.…”

The Identification of Sustainable Opportunities in Existing Enterprises

“…We included a variable indicating whether consultants belonged to one of the Big Four consulting firms or to more local and small consultancy firms, as Big Four consultants could be more likely to apply 'routine templates' (see Suddaby & Greenwood, 2001) . We also included controls for country effects, for family firms (Craig & Dibrell, 2006), for firm age, firm size and the type of industry. Finally, we controlled for the percentage of new products and services recently introduced since firm innovativeness may be positively related to the identification of sustainable opportunities (Lichtenstein, 2011).…”