ABSTRACT
Introduction “Do family rms really behave dierently from nonfamily rms? If so, how and why are they dierent?” (Chrisman Chua & Sharma 2005, 567). Family rm scholars have long argued that family involvement and behavior in the rm leads family rms to have unique strategic outcomes relative to their nonfamily counterparts. Overlapping family and rm systems are thought to introduce family members’ emotions and goals into management, enabling family rms’ unique outcomes (Gómez-Mejía, Cruz, Berrone, & Castro, 2011). Despite intentions to integrate family and rm assumptions, family rm research has traditionally focused on family rms’ unique strategic outcomes at the expense of not fully understanding the family members’ cognitions, emotions, goals, and behaviors that drive them. Indeed, family rm research often: (1) builds broad assumptions about how structural aspects of the family, such as the number of family members in the rm or the number of generations involved in the rm, will impact strategic and rm-level outcomes and (2) uses distal rm-level proxies to latently measure family behavior (Berrone Cruz & Gómez-Mejía 2012; Morris & Kellermanns 2013). Consequently, the family rm literature’s microfoundations, which we characterize as the family rm members’ aective, cognitive, and behavioral factors that drive unique family rm outcomes, remain unnaturally constricted and generally untested.
