Unmasking the Social Ghost in the Machine: How the Need to Belong and Family Business Potency Affect Family Firm Performance

Abstract

Research often assumes that a controlling family’s social bonds contributes to superior firm performance. However, there is little theory to address these relationships and findings are often mixed. Here, we integrate resource-based and need-to-belong theories to address these issues, introducing family business potency as a key mediating variable between family cohesion, participative strategy processes, and firm performance in 109 family firms. Altogether, our study answers ongoing theoretical calls for more need-based psychological research in family firms, introduces family business potency to the literature, and contributes to research on family firm heterogeneity. Implications for future research and practice are also discussed.

Constrained but not contained: How marginalized entrepreneurs overcome institutional bias and mobilize resources

“…Notably, each of these three resource mobilization strategies challenges or extends some aspect of existing entrepreneurship scholarship. Family transmutation challenges widely held assumptions about the general availability of family support, which are regularly depicted in research on social capital (Chua, Chrisman, Kellermanns, & Wu, 2011), venture capital (Kotha & George, 2012), family business (e.g., Simarasl, Jiang, Kellermanns, & Debicki, 2020), and family entrepreneurship (e.g., Aldrich & Cliff, 2003). As the evidence from our study shows, however, in certain institutional contexts, a more collectivist view of the family can lead families to prioritize an aspiring entrepreneur's adherence to societal norms over their decision to support such individual pursuits, thus creating unique challenges for resource mobilization.…”

Enhancing Enterprise Family Social Capital Through Family Governance: An Identity Perspective

“…Family business research has focused extensively on understanding how families can ensure the success of their business (e.g., Le Breton-Miller & Miller, 2018; Simarasl et al, 2020; Tognazzo & Neubaum, 2020). Highly successful business families have been found to evolve into enterprise families as they share ownership of multiple assets (e.g., investments or real estate) and multiple entities (e.g., a family business, family office and/or family philanthropic foundations) across multiple generations (De Groot et al, 2022).…”