Nadine Kammerlander

Non-family employees are an important resource in family firms; therefore, understanding their well-being is of utmost relevance for management theory. Integrating leadership theory into family business research, we draw from the emotional contagion and person-organization fit theories and argue that employee well-being in terms of organizational-level affective climate and individual-level job satisfaction is higher in firms managed by a family CEO. Moreover, we hypothesize that this relationship becomes stronger with higher levels of CEO transformational leadership and weaker with increasing CEO tenure. We test our hypotheses using a large-scale, multilevel dataset comprising 2,246 direct reports of the respective CEO and 41,531 employees from 497 family- and non-family-managed firms. By applying multilevel modeling, we found support for our proposed hypotheses. Post-hoc tests reveal that the positive effect of family management is particularly strong in first generation family firms. This article contributes to research on leadership and on family firms and advances the evidence-based debate about employees in those firms.

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.

Organizational identity has been envisaged as a critical precursor of organizational adaptation. However, the various dimensions of identity and their precise influence on organizations’ responses to discontinuous technologies remain underexplored. Using field data on the responses of German publishing houses to the emergence of digitization, we provide an explorative basis to fill this gap. Our analysis suggests that two dimensions of organizational identity exist, each having different main effects: focus, which ranges from inclusive to exclusive, significantly affects the degree to which companies adopt the new technology or do not; locus of identity, which may be self- or environment-related, is strongly associated with the speed of the response to discontinuous change. We then explore the interactive effect of identity focus and locus on incumbent adaptation. Our inquiry reveals that each of the four focus-locus combinations shows an idiosyncratic pattern of adaptation regarding the response timing, the activeness versus passiveness of the response, and, where applicable, the precise type of active response strategy. Our research adds to the emerging stream of research on cognitive determinants of organizational adaptation and is one of the first empirical studies to explain incumbent response heterogeneity through the lens of organizational identity.