Three essays on innovation in family firms and corporate governance
- Autores: Malgorzata Kurak
- Directores de la Tesis: Teresa García Marco (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2017
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Reinhilde Veugelers (presid.), Martín Larraza Kintana (secret.), Alfredo De Massis (voc.)
- Menciones:
- Europea
- Calificación: Sobresaliente Cum Laude
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Resumen
The first study tackles the challenges that various owners, e.g. a family owner, a holding firm and an industrial firm, may encounter while bringing their firms to achieve competitive advantage through innovation. It offers a proposition that examines the impact of the power contingencies like an ownership concentration and the cultural power distance on the relationship between a specific owner type and a firm’s innovation. We theorize that the impact of an owner’s type on innovation is determined by her power position within an organization. We access this power contingency within an organization from both the top-down and bottom-up perspective. That is, we argue that an owner with concentrated ownership should have a privilege over other firm’s actors in terms of their impact on innovation, but also we claim that an owner’s power position within an organization relates to the viewpoint of her subordinates on the unequal distribution of power. To measure these interdependencies, we have incorporated a measure of cultural power distance from two separate sources that have captured this phenomenon in the past: the Power Distance Index (PDI) by Hofstede, and we use an additional measure of power distance provided by the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) study for a robustness test of our results. Our findings reveal the positive impact of family ownership on a firm’s innovation performance. We also find that the country-specific context and not the firm-level concentration significantly moderates the relationship between family ownership and the firm’s level of innovation performance. More specifically, in a context of lower power distance, we can observe that the positive link between the family owner as a top shareholder and a firm’s innovation performance is enhanced. Our main contribution, beyond this robust finding on the positive impact of family ownership on innovation, is analyzing the owner’s type effects of less explored but common owner’s types like a holding firm or industrial firm, and also applying the indications of the agency theory in a context of power contingencies within a firm.
The second paper deals with an especially timely topic, namely how the processual managerial systems impact on family firm’s innovation with a focus on the role of non-family managers and the decentralized decision-making systems. The unresolved tensions between organizational leaders (i.e., the owners and managers) can bring a firm to failure. In family firms those tensions can easily escalate, because the line between the role of a principal and the agent at the time of exercising ownership, control and management is rather blurry. The owning families’ aversion to sharing control over the family firm can substantially jeopardize a firm’s growth and also its innovation. That aversion obstructs family owners and managers to delegate more responsibilities to the non-family related managers and employees. Recently, Bloom et al. (2012) discovered that, due to the importance of trust, the number of adult male family members was the key determinant of family firm size in India. This finding shows how severe the issues of delegating authority to the non-family workforce may become in family firms. Decentralization, as we have defined it, means that managers can take some decisions in certain business areas, and that those decisions impact on company’s strategies. The results of this study reveal that a non-linear relationship between the ratio of non-family managers and innovation in family firms does exist. We also show how the presence of decentralization can shift the turning point of this relationship, helping family firms to achieve higher innovative outcomes. More precisely, our main contribution in this study is that we extend the view on non-family managers through the lenses of the agency theory. We show that non-family managers can be both stewards and agents in a family firm. That is, the presence of non-family managers in family firms increases the innovative output in one hand. On the other hand, innovation is reduced for high levels in the proportion of non-family managers, which can most likely be due to the unfair redistribution of rents or the presence of a too-strict monitoring system in family firms.
The third study aims to uncover the root causes of family firm unwillingness to innovate. Family firms possess a continuum of capabilities that can help enhance their technological innovation. We have considered different types of a firm’s general-purpose and market-specific innovative capabilities to analyze how “the ability and willingness” paradox impacts the innovate outcomes in family controlled firms as compared to non-family firms. These capabilities are: (1) the capability to transfer and adopt knowledge, which as a “general-purpose” capability can be “deployed in a relatively broad range of uses and markets”; and (2) the technological capability, that as a “market-specific” capability captures “a degree to which knowledge is transferable across organizational tasks or contexts.” Both have been shown to positively impact firm’s innovation. Our results reveal that the positive link between a firm’s capability to transfer and adopt knowledge and innovation (i.e., product innovation, process innovation and number of product innovations) weakens with an increasing family involvement. However, we do not find the same result in terms of a family firm’s technological capability and innovation. In fact, there we find that this positive link with product innovation is further strengthened at a higher level of family involvement. This study extends, beyond the socioemotional wealth (SEW) preservation argument, the understanding of “the ability and willingness paradox” in a family firm’s innovation. We show that the balance between ability and willingness to innovate in family firms is a combination of their ability and a controlling family’s assessment on the superiority of this ability. That is, hiring a greater proportion of highly skilled employees (which also indicates that family owners are less loss-averse towards their SEW), does not necessarily lead to a higher willingness to innovate. The lack of trust in the superiority of this ability significantly harms a family firm’s innovative outcomes. Beyond its academic contribution, our conclusions also inform family business practitioners about this circumstance of “mistrust” which triggers a family firm’s unwillingness to innovate.
