The Persistence of Multifamily Firms: Founder Imprinting, Simple Rules, and Monitoring Processes

Abstract

This study focuses on a particular form of family businesses-businesses with at least two unrelated founding families-and how their organizational form of a multifamily business persists over several generations. Using an inductive approach to study five multifamily cases, we discovered that these firms did not meet complexity with complex structures and processes. Instead, four cases developed and utilized simple rules imprinted by the founders and pulled through to current generations, enabling effective mutual monitoring and persistence of the multifamily organizational form. The lack of simple rules development is associated with one multifamily business to abandon this organizational form.

Social Structures, Social Relationships, and Family Firms

“…The fact that trading communities such as these seem to possess characteristics that one might normally associate with family firms suggests that they deserve more research attention. Indeed, it would be useful to understand the extent to which social relationships and other characteristics of trading communities or community enterprises are similar or different from family firms, business families (Steier, Chrisman, & Chua, 2015), multifamily firms (Pieper, Smith, Kudlats, & Astrachan, 2015), and business groups (Morck & Yeung, 2003) and how those differences are shaped by institutional contexts (Steier, 2009).…”

The double-edged sword of purpose-driven behavior in sustainable venturing

“…Burton and Beckman 2007;Detienne and Cardon 2010;Fauchart and Gruber 2011;Mathias et al 2015). Most of our understanding of the role of imprinting has revolved around the founder of the enterprise, who has proven to be a key imprinter shaping the firm even through successive generations (Pieper et al 2015). For example, Fauchart and Gruber (2011) show that social or political values, which make up the social identity of some entrepreneurs, imprint the firm differentially from profit-driven entrepreneurs in ways that significantly alter the firm´s actions and performance.…”

A configurational analysis of the antecedents of entrepreneurial orientation

“…Emotional attachment may induce family business successors to fear to lose something precious that they have inherited and want to preserve and increase (Berrone, Cruz, & Gomez-Mejia, 2012;Strike, Pascual, Stephen, & Lorenzo, 2015). When this factor is present, need-forindependence could sustain attempts to introduce strategic discontinuities in an organization in which the legacy of the previous generation is still present (Pieper, Anne, Jerry, & Joseph, 2015); absence of this motivation would lead the leader to simply replicate existing strategies, or fail in taking the entrepreneurial component of the predecessor's legacy (Jaskiewicz et al, 2015).…”