Building on social identity theory, we theorize and find that in a merger, paired family firms are better able to retain employees and improve postmerger performance compared to other merger pairs. We contribute to social identity theory by theorizing better postmerger performance as mediated by job security for family firm combinations. We also contribute to the job security and M&A literature by examining how job security and postmerger performance vary based on the paired social identity of owners. In addition to identity similarity, the type of identity also matters in mergers. We argue that family owner social identity similarity fosters greater integration between merging parties while allowing family owner pairs to retain some autonomy through their employees, thereby maximizing postmerger performance. Our data on private Swedish firms, complemented by eleven qualitative interviews across five countries and three continents, confirm that family mergers outperform other merger combinations via job security. In a supplementary critical experiment examining industry dissimilarity, we compare the socioemotional wealth perspective–which emphasizes loss aversion and predicts family firms’ unrelated diversification avoidance–to the social identity theory. Consistent with social identity theory, our results show that both job security and postmerger performance improve with unrelated family firm mergers.

Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) is an essential concept in entrepreneurship research. Many scholars have shown CE theoretical and empirical implications for firms’ survival, development, and growth. We use a systematic literature review approach to analyse and discuss 214 articles published in top-tier journals from 1985 to 2023. This review proposes a conceptual model and highlights that little attention has been given to discussing the role of context in the corporate entrepreneurial process. Thus, we propose a research agenda for contextualizing corporate entrepreneurship concerning business, social, spatial, institutional, organizational, and ownership contexts.

Research Summary: Entrepreneurs make critical decisions in uncertain environments where information is limited, outcomes are difficult to predict, and multiple goals often compete. Yet, existing research offers scattered insights into how entrepreneurs dynamically adapt to such contexts and how their decisions are shaped by behavioral and cognitive foundations such as judgment, intuition, and experience. We shed light on these phenomena by exploring how decision-making is influenced by factors at multiple levels, from individual traits and family dynamics to team interactions and organizational structures. A key aspect of our inquiry focuses on how entrepreneurs manage uncertainty by balancing economic goals, such as growth and profitability, with non-economic objectives like social impact, sustainability, or knowledge advancement. By integrating these perspectives, this work offers a conceptual framework that connects antecedents, processes, and outcomes of entrepreneurial decision-making under uncertainty and competing goals, providing a promising roadmap for future research.

Managerial Summary: Entrepreneurs often make decisions in uncertain environments, where they must contend with limited information and competing goals. This work explores how entrepreneurs balance economic objectives, such as profit, with non-economic ones, like satisfying various stakeholders, achieving social impact, and sustainability. It highlights the role of individual, family, team, and organizational factors in shaping these decisions, offering novel insights into how entrepreneurs can manage trade-offs, adapt feedback-based strategies, and recalibrate priorities over time. For owners, managers, and business leaders, understanding these dynamics can lead to better decision-making, improved risk management, enhanced strategic alignment, increased innovation, and a more balanced approach to growth.

When the CEO-owner of an SME suddenly dies, who should take over? Integrating the social embeddedness perspective with research on crisis management, we theorize that an SME’s financial health gets progressively worse before it stabilizes and recovers, reflecting an inverse U-shaped relationship between time since the CEO-owner’s sudden death and an SME’s financial distress. We then explore how successors’ family and firm embeddedness moderate this relationship. Using a longitudinal sample of Swedish SMEs, we find general support for our theorizing. While nonfamily successors lead to less financial distress than family successors immediately following a CEO-owner’s sudden death, the opposite occurs in the long-term. Further, successors with high firm embeddedness are associated with less financial distress than those with low firm embeddedness in both the short- and long-term. Additionally, our post-hoc analyses reveal that successors with high firm embeddedness, independent of their family embeddedness, outperform those low in firm embeddedness. Family successors lacking firm embeddedness report the highest financial distress, whereas those with high firm embeddedness experience the lowest. Our social embeddedness perspective on succession after the CEO-owner’s sudden death therefore contends that successor embeddedness explains differences in an SME’s financial health, with the importance of successor firm tenure overshadowing the effect of family status.

In this study, we seek to understand firm behaviour during times of crisis, with a particular focus on family firms in different contexts. We theorize that family control mitigates (i.e. negatively moderates) the relationship between economic crisis and the layoff of employees, resulting in a higher propensity of family firms to retain their employees during a crisis compared to their nonfamily counterparts. Furthermore, taking a closer look at family firms, based on their location, we argue that family firms in rural regions are more likely to adopt measures leading to involuntary job turnover than family firms in urban areas due to a higher sensitivity to the loss of socioemotional wealth following a business closure. Relying on a panel dataset of Swedish private firms active in the period 2004-2012, our study contributes to a better understanding of family firms as employers in different contexts.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the proclivity of family businesses to engage in external corporate venturing, specifically investments targeted at exploratory searches in ventures in their early stages of development. From a behavioural perspective, we investigated whether family control influences the likelihood of engaging in such risky initiatives and to what extent key organizational contingencies, i.e. financial slack and risk-taking endeavours, shift socioemotional wealth preservation as a reference point. We tested our hypotheses on a sample of 12,320 firm-year observations gathered from 2,548 European listed firms in the period 2011-2018. We found that despite family firms engaging less than nonfamily firms in external corporate venturing, their risk attitudes change under both extremely favourable and uncertain organizational contingencies.

Limited anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that family ownership status – whether a company is family-owned or publicly held – may influence job seekers’ intentions to apply. Drawing from the theory of person-organization fit and utilizing qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), we conducted an exploratory study analyzing survey data from 756 senior-level job seekers in Switzerland. Our analysis identified distinct cohorts of job seekers who consistently applied to family-owned versus non-family-owned companies. We discovered two profiles of applicants who seem to favor family employers: Fulfillment Seekers and Reward Seekers. Despite their differences, both profiles share an intrinsic need for praise. In contrast, we identified one profile of non-family firm applicants, Hero Followers, who prioritize neither praise nor pride but have a strong desire to work for an admired superior – the very thing Fulfillment Seekers and Reward Seekers deprioritize. Our findings suggest that distinct groups of job seekers are motivated by different reward combinations: Pay, Perks, Personas, Pride, which they expect to find in either family or non-family companies. Family firms could benefit from emphasizing these rewards in their recruitment processes, compensation schemes, and employer branding strategies.

This paper offers a systematic review of the literature on nonfinancial reporting in family firms, which has substantially grown in recent years. We identified and analyzed 74 articles published between 2002 and 2023. The work contributes to the domains of nonfinancial reporting and family business by providing an integrative and critical overview of the literature and by identifying future research avenues. We conclude by offering practical implications for managers, consultants, and policymakers.

A firm’s proactive engagement in risk, which has been deeply intertwined with the entrepreneurship literature, is essential to sustaining a firm’s long-term competitive advantage. Drawing on BAM’s mixed gamble logic in a family firm context, the present study offers a theoretical framework examining how firm risk returns differ in the contexts of distressed (the worst) and nondistressed (the best) family and nonfamily firms. We predict that family control moderates the risk taking performance relationship. That is, compared with nonfamily firms, a mixed gamble featuring the prospect of socioemotional and financial losses leads family firms to extract higher financial returns from risk taking when in financial distress, but lower financial returns when they are not in financial distress. Our theoretical expectations are supported using a matched sample of Swedish firms.