Family owned businesses and their management

Family

Moshavi D. & Koch M.J., (n.d). The Adoption of Family-Friendly Practices in Family Owned Firms.

The article is centered on the family business and how the conflicts that emanate from the family business affects the non-family employees and what repercussions it has on the business as well. It highlights the work and family systems interaction and how that interaction can be managed. This is an empirical investigation into how the family business owners manage the work and family conflicts that face the non-family employees. The article first highlights some pertinent theories that help explain the influence of family on business like the resource-dependency theory and institutional theory in order to help the reader understand the entire concept. The researcher used the survey method to collect his data and 680 human resource manager filled in questionnaires that were used. The dependent variable is sighted as work-family responsiveness and the independent variable used here is the family ownership. The research finds out that the non-family owned firms were likely to adopt the flextime than the family owned. This was the same trend for the flexible speeding accounts use and more likely to use the resource referral programs as the article indicates.

Beehr T.A., Drexler J.A. & Faulkner S., (1997). Working in a Small Family Business: Empirical Comparison to Non-Family Businesses. Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vol. 18.John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The article highlights the factors and conflicts that surround the ownership of a small family firm in specific. The article fist looks at the positives and negative areas of working in a family business, to both the individual and the business. In order to come up with the data, the researchers did a literature review on family business as well as preliminary interviews. The hypothesis here is that "conflicts should be associated with negative outcomes." The overriding theme and findings here is that more conflicts seem to be found among the family owned businesses than those that are not family owned. The data was gathered from randomly picked respondents who were business owners and contact kept over a long period of time. There were also interviews among 20 family and non-family members of 6 businesses in Michigan.

Jennings J.E., Breitkreuz Rhoda S. & Albert J.E., (2013). When Family Members are also Business Owner: Is Entrepreneurship God for Families?

The article is on the effect of business ownership on families. This is an agenda setting paper that looks into the issue of whether family business ownership is healthy for the family. It gives several case scenarios and uses these as a call to the family scholars to look further into the subject and determine whether the glamor behind family business ownership is real. The article also provides emergent critiques of the concept of family business entrepreneurship. The paper is predominantly case studies put together in a bid to highlight the challenges that families face as they strive to put up and manage their businesses and acting as a reflective reference for readers to critically relook at the aspect of family business ownership. The researcher further highlights other factors surrounding the business management within the family like gender, marital status and even generational difference and how these have effect on the roles played within the family businesses.

Sciascia S., Climton E. & Nason R., (2013). Family Communication and Innovativeness in Family Firms. Interdisciplinary Journal of Applied Family Studies.

The writer here takes a closer look at the family business and specifically the communication trends that are experienced within such businesses. It also looks at how the communication helps to boost innovativeness in family business. The paper seeks to examine the effects of communication on innovation within the family business and how much innovation there is within the family business setting. The researcher here also looks at the variations in innovation among the family businesses and the reasons behind these disparities. The researcher highlights the various factors that are likely to affect the innovation within the family business setting and how these have over years changed. The data that was used was widely sourced from case studies of various family owned business in contrast to the business not owned by families. There was a general conclusion that non-family owned businesses seemed to show higher levels of innovation and better structured communication systems.