The Organizational Evolutions and Strategies of Family Businesses in Taiwan

Abstract

The family is, no doubt, the oldest and longest running social unit in our world. Families were formed along with small communities long before commerce began. In fact, families, often in connection with the local communities, sustained themselves by self-sufficient means [1]. Family businesses are most popular and play an important role in lots of countries, and also are the cornerstones of economic development in Taiwan. They not only expanded the Taiwan economy, participated and witnessed the economic miracle in the past, but also formed the main part of overall enterprise structure in Taiwan through creating a great deal of employments, and thus made a stable and prosperous social life [2]. Many large enterprises in Taiwan are composed by family business, and most of them were growing up and becoming robust after going through obstacles in the way. For example, the leading manufacturing company, Foxconn Technology Group was mold and die manufacturer at first, and many companies from the 10 biggest international brands published by the Ministry of Economic Affairs (2012) [3] such like ASUS, ACER, MAXXIS and GIANT were also grown up from family business or small enterprises. Now they are the models and mirrors for the family business. Through observation and review of mass literatures, this paper explores the organizational evolutions in structure and the possible appropriate strategies for the family businesses in Taiwan. The major findings in this study are: 1) the organizational evolutions are from simple structure to functional, divisional and compound structure; 2) the leadership patterns are from affection-directed to regulation-directed and rationality-directed approach; 3) the strategies are from localization to internationalization. Finally, this paper constructs an integrated model based on above findings. C.-C. Wang et al.

Technology and Culture in Subsistence Small Businesses

“…In business relationships, opportunism is the search for personal interests through deception [52,53]. Opportunism has a wide variety of behaviors [54].…”