The Importance of Looking toward the Future and Building on the Past: Entrepreneurial Risk Taking and Image in Family Firms

Drawing on organizational identity theory, we develop a model linking family ownership and expectations, entrepreneurial risk taking, and image in family firms to explain family firm growth. Testing our model on a sample of 163 Swiss family firms, we suggest that entrepreneurial risk taking and image can both lead to growth in family firms. We further find that family expectations have an influence on both entrepreneurial risk taking and family firm image. This finding suggests that family firms may benefit from two growth paths - forward looking risk-taking and the image of the family firm that builds on the past, and that these paths are nurtured by family expectations.