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PublicationRelational embeddedness and firm growth: Comparing spousal and sibling entrepreneursIntegrating relational embeddedness arguments with Penrosean growth theory, we compare the growth of firms run by spousal entrepreneurs with firms run by sibling entrepreneurs. We theorize that trust, identification, and mutual obligations—the three facets of relational embeddedness—are more pronounced in spousal teams than in sibling teams, which provides spousal teams with advantages over sibling teams in generating firm growth. Probing a sample of all private firms in Sweden over a three-year period, we find support for this conjecture. Exploring boundary conditions to this baseline relationship, we also find that firm age weakens the growth advantages of spousal teams over sibling teams and that industry experience heterogeneity within the entrepreneurial team reinforces these growth advantages. These results provide important contributions for research on firm growth, the social embeddedness of firms, entrepreneurship, and family business.Type:Journal:Volume:Issue:
Scopus© Citations 82 -
PublicationWhy family matters: The impact of family resources on immigrant entrepreneurs' exit from entrepreneurship(Elsevier Science Publ., 2016-11)We integrate insights from the social embeddedness perspective with research on immigrant entrepreneurship to theorize on how family resources influence exit from entrepreneurship among previously unemployed immigrant entrepreneurs. Results from a cohort study of immigrant entrepreneurs in Sweden reveal that family resources are important for immigrants to integrate economically into a country. We find that having family members in geographical proximity increases immigrant entrepreneurs’ likelihood of remaining in entrepreneurship. Further, family financial capital enhances immigrant entrepreneurs’ likelihood of remaining in entrepreneurship as well as their likelihood of exiting to paid employment. Although often neglected in immigrant entrepreneurship studies, resources accruing from spousal relationships with natives influence entrepreneurs’ exit behavior. We discuss contributions for research on entrepreneurial exit, entrepreneurs’ social embeddedness, and immigrant entrepreneurship.Type:Journal:Volume:Issue:
Scopus© Citations 114 -
PublicationThe Impact of Storytelling on Innovation: a Multi Case Study(Academy of Management, 2015-01)The founder’s values and beliefs are often determinant for family business’ later organizational path and as such affect the organization’s level of innovation. Building on recent research that has identified storytelling as an important means to imprint the founder’s values and beliefs, we apply a multi-case research design to investigate how different foci of those stories affect a family firm’s level of innovation. We suggest that founder-centered stories entail a focus on decisions that match with the founder’s values, hierarchical decision-making, and destructive conflicts, which ultimately lead to low levels of innovation. To the contrary, family-centered stories free family members in their decision-making and entail a collaborative decision-making characterized by low levels of conflicts. As a result, those firms have higher levels of innovation as compared to firms with founder-centered stories. We summarize our findings in a model of path creation in family firms.Type:Journal:Issue:
Scopus© Citations 1 -
PublicationThe Impact of Shared Stories on Family Firm Innovation : a Multi-Case Study(Sage, 2015-09-18)Innovation is a key determinant of long-term success for family firms. We apply a multiple case study research design to investigate the relationship between stories that are shared among family members across generations and the family firms' innovations. We derive a set of eight propositions suggesting that founder focus is negatively, and family focus is positively associated with innovation. We further propose that these relationships are mediated by the scope of decision-making options, the distribution of decision-making power between generations, and the role of conflict in the families.Type:Journal:Volume:Issue:
Scopus© Citations 172 -
PublicationRegional Influence on the Prevalence of Family versus Non-Family Start-ups(Elsevier Science Publ., 2014-05-01)We integrate insights from family business and organizational ecology into the entrepreneurship field by constructing a theoretical framework that explains how the regional context impacts family and non-family start-ups in differing ways. Regional count data models based on a rich longitudinal dataset reveal that while economic factors such as population size and growth in regions are primarily associated with the number of non-family start-ups, factors related to regional embeddedness, such as pre-existing small family businesses as well as favorable community attitudes toward small businesses, are more strongly associated with the number of family start-ups. Our research provides support for the notion that ‘the regional context' is an important yet under-theorized area for research on venture creation and family business.Type:Journal:Volume:Issue:
Scopus© Citations 130 -
PublicationInternal versus External Ownership Transition in Family Firms: An Embeddedness Perspective(USASBE, 2013-11-01)We investigate factors that influence family business owners' choice between passing ownership within the family or to new external owners. Taking an embeddedness perspective focusing on owner-family structure and involvement, we hypothesize that ownership dispersion, number of potential heirs, multigenerational involvement, and whether the chief executive officer is a family member influence the choice of an internal or external transition of ownership. We build a longitudinal data set from a sample of 3,829 family firms and their ownership transitions. Our theorizing and findings regarding ownership transitions complements the abundant research on management succession and therefore constitutes an important contribution to the literature.
Scopus© Citations 87 -
PublicationCEO divorce and firm performance – The role of CEO’s family situation( 2020)
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PublicationThe influence of entrepreneurial teams’ structural power inequality on firm performance( 2020)In this research article, we investigate how structural power inequality within entrepreneurial teams influences firm performance. We argue that very high and very low levels of structural power inequality undermine cooperation and communication within the team and therefore inhibit the efficient deployment of entrepreneurial team members’ resources. We find evidence for an inverted U-shaped relationship between structural power inequality and firm performance. Furthermore, we investigate the influence of social ties and find that the inverted U-relationship becomes stronger in the presence of co-worker ties and weaker in the presence of family ties. These results provide important contributions for research on power in organizations and entrepreneurship.
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PublicationThe impact of entrepreneurs’ life events on entrepreneurial ventures’ performance(BCERC, 2019-06-07)Events in the private lives of entrepreneurs often involve the transition into a new life stage, the birth of a child being a particularly important life event. Building on work-family interface and upper echelons literatures, we investigate the impact of the birth of an entrepreneur’s child on firm performance in the context of privately held firms and test our hypotheses using Swedish data on owner-managed firms in the period between 2004 and 2014. Our results indicate a negative short-term impact of birth on firm performance and suggest that this impact is particularly strong for female entrepreneurs, for the birth of the first kid and for knowledge-intense firms.
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