| 1. |
- Banerjee, Anup
(author)
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The role of the board chair : Changing expectations and hybrid organizations
- 2023
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The purpose of this dissertation is to enhance our understanding of the changing role of the board chair and what this means for hybrid organizations and their board work. Historically, the role of the boards and their chairs evolved around safeguarding shareholders’ financial interests. Whilst this responsibility persists, boards are increasingly expected to embrace societal issues in board governance discussions and to rethink performance measurement systems to incorporate the social impacts generated by their organizations. To navigate these challenges, boards are encouraged to adopt hybrid board governance systems that strike a balance between financial and social mission targets. Board chairs can guide boards to secure such a hybrid outlook, but we lack academic insights on this role beyond financial performance. Systematically reviewing four decades of research, the first article of the dissertation demonstrates the need and opportunities for considering divergent stakeholder interests and contextual factors influencing the role of the board chair. Building on this, the second article engages with board chairs and general secretaries in social hybrid organizations and unearths different board-specific and field level challenges that currently hinder boards from implementing social impact measurements. Subsequently, the third article discusses how adopting a qualitative, engaged scholarship approach can generate practice informed research, contributing new understanding for boards and their chairs. Together, these insights offer implications for theory and practice and promote an agenda for future research that embraces a social purpose beyond profit maximization.
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| 2. |
- Van Helvert-Beugels, Judith
(author)
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The emerging role of advisory boards in strategizing in family firms : A sensemaking perspective
- 2018
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis addresses the emerging role of advisory boards in strategizing in privately held family firms. The thesis focuses on the period in which family firms start considering to work with an advisory board through the board’s first several years of existence. A micro-level strategy perspective is combined with insights from sensemaking theory to understand how the practitioners involved make sense of this new arena involved in strategizing. Empirically, the study is based on four real-time case studies that primarily use observations along with interviews and secondary documents. The within- and cross case interpretations are integrated into a conceptual model that explains how the roles of advisory boards in strategizing emerge over time.The most important finding of this study is that advisory boards emerge into unique configurations through the sensemaking activities of the practitioners involved. Moreover, this study shows that practitioners make sense of both the content that should be addressed and the role and tasks of the advisory board. This sensemaking is achieved in different ways and in different forms (individual versus mediated versus collective sensemaking), which explains the substantial differences between the advisory boards in different situations. It is suggested that the lack of an institutional frame or institutional norms provides considerable freedom in interpreting the role of the advisory boards, through which such boards largely become a contextualized practice. Two underlying causal mechanisms have been identified that drive the sensemaking processes of the practitioners involved in advisory board meetings: the learning orientation of the practitioners involved and the (a)symmetry between the advisory board members on the one hand and the family firm decision makers on the other hand.This dissertation contributes to our current understanding of advisory boards using a micro-level strategy lens instead of a governance lens to understand the emerging role of the advisory board in strategizing in the family firm context. This approach has helped to characterize the advising and sensemaking processes at play and how advisory boards emerge into unique configurations over time. Second, this dissertation contributes to the strategy as practice literature by devoting attention to a new arena involved in strategizing that emerges over time and the elements that play a role in this process. Instead of studying how an existing arena is performed, this study focuses on the emergence of a new strategy arena along with the practices used, the praxis performed and the practitioners involved. Thus I show how such a new arena is contextualized and becomes situated over time, attending to the processual dimensions, the content dimensions, the outcomes of the process and the outcomes generated by strategizing.
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| 3. |
- Mari, Isabelle
(author)
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Developing trust among family owners in multiple branches family firms
- 2018
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation studies trust in Multiple Branches Family Firms. It focuses on a form of trust that has received little attention: collective trust (Kramer 2010). Drawing on self-categorization theory (Tajfel and Turner 1986; 1987), the relational models of procedural justice (Blader and Tyler 2015), and the Economies of Worth (Boltanski and Thévenot 1986, 1991), this dissertation provides a framework for understanding how collective trust evolves when groups branch out. It sheds light on the role of the leader(s) in this process. This study investigates how changes in identity perception – due to changes in group’s structure – can erode collective trust, and the procedures the leader(s) can create to maintain identification with the group, as well as collective trust. Empirically, the study is based on in-depth and interpretive case studies of collective trust erosion and maintenance in four family firms. The evolution of the relationships between family members in the family and business contexts is apprehended through in-depth interviews. When the family branches out, family leaders tend to develop formalities to maintain collective trust. These formalities aim to reduce family members’ perception of vulnerability, and address the changes in identity that family members experience over time. As the family evolves, family members develop varying identifications, moving from Family to Branch identification. Over the years, Family identification tends to decline leading to Family collective trust erosion. Family leaders can create procedures to maintain superordinate group (SOG) identification, and collective trust. Three forms of identification emerged: The Family SOG, The Professionalized Family SOG, and The Family Owners SOG.This study offers a new perspective on trust erosion and maintenance with a consideration for the group level as a source and object of trust. Two distinct forms of trust erosion emerged: one deriving from a perception of leaders’ unfair treatment towards group members, and the other one from gradual changes in group members’ identity perception of one another. In these processes of trust erosion, I identified two triggers: the denunciation of the familial nature of the family leaders’ procedures in business situations, and the denunciation of family leaders’ illegitimate ways of qualifying family members. They result from family members’ changes in identification when the family branches out. Family leaders can avoid that trust erodes through the generation of new salient superordinate group identifications that address family members’ changes in identity perception.
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| 4. |
- Nazir, Imran
(author)
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Nurturing entrepreneurial venturing capabilities : A study of family firms
- 2017
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The purpose of this dissertation is to improve our understanding of how family firms adapt to their dynamic environments through creating new businesses and to explore the role of dynamic capabilities driving firm’s strategic entrepreneurial activities. I address the above aims by conducting qualitative case studies of Hum Network and AVT channels, which are both family firms at the time of their entry into the deregulated TV industry of Pakistan in 2005. A deregulated environment is often characterized as highly dynamic owing to the rapid and frequent changes that occur in customer groups and product offerings and the mix of competitors. Reduced barriers to entry through government legislation often produce a massive shift in the structure of competition, as it attracts new entrants to the industry, intensifying the hostility of the business environment. The success and long-term survival in this increasingly dynamic environment often rests on building dynamic capabilities that transform firm resources and competences and revitalize existing firm businesses. However, we still lack detailed insights into how family firms build dynamic capabilities to facilitate the implementation of entrepreneurial initiatives, which focus on the creation of new corporate businesses.In the literature of family entrepreneurship, the dominant view holds that family objectives concerned with ensuring longevity made family firms low risktakers and conservative in their strategies and they are thus less likely to engage in venturing initiatives. Some scholars point to potential insufficiencies when family firms use their resources: they argue that family owner-managers often draw from a family pool rather than a wider market for talent which can stifle the development of capabilities needed to engage in entrepreneurial initiatives. Contrary to this view, one of the key insights that emerge from this study is that to cope with changes in the competitive environment, family firms adopt new business venturing as a strategic approach to establish and protect their position in a competitive industry. By a strategic approach, I mean the intent of family founding executives to seek strategic adaptation, particularly through continuously identifying unmet customer needs in the industry and exploiting these needs through producing new media products and services well in advance of their competitors. To enact or implement their strategic imperative, both firms develope a set of capabilities, which I call entrepreneurial venturing capabilities (EVC).First, opportunity refinement capability refers to the ability to envision new possibilities in the market combined with the ability to evaluate and modify the opportunity according to new insights to shape the venture opportunity in ways that more effectively address the unmet customer or market needs. It reflects management’s abilities in imaging new venture opportunities based on the industry experience and to further refine these opportunities by deliberately composing teams at the top management level with additional industry experience to collectively form judgements on the attractiveness of new opportunities.Second, resource mobilization capability consists of an ability to develop and integrate the internal and external resources needed to develop new media offering for the new ventures. It reflects management’s ability in building enduring and trust-based relationships with actors inside the organization to accumulate and integrate resources as well as ability to form external collaborative relationships necessary to ensure the continuous development of new innovative products.Third, customer orientation capability is the ability to develop and maintain close relationships with customers to ensure long-term success of the new venture in the competitive environment. Customer orientation reflects management’s ability in accumulating relational resources such as reputation, image, trust and credibility through promoting behaviors, this puts an emphasize on understanding and aligning with the customer’s cultural values proactively to collect and use customer information to adopt to their current and future needs as well as collaborating with the customers regularly.Overall, the capabilities that I identify enable family firms to sense and calibrate the opportunities in the fast-changing deregulated environment, to rapidly mobilize resources for new product development to seize the opportunities, and to quickly transform their product and services by disseminating customer knowledge throughout the organization to meet the shifting demands of customers and gain market dominance.
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| 5. |
- Sindambiwe, Pierre
(author)
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The challenges of continuity in family businesses in Rwanda
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Focusing on a developing country, this study investigates how an owning family builds its business’ continuity. While scholars of family businesses tend to depict the continuity of a family firm in terms of family succession, preserving the family legacy, or the firm’s longevity, in the social context of a developing country that is dominated by instability and hostility, family firms are subject to day-by-day survival risks. My approach is viewing family businesses’ continuity as day-by-day survival for the sake of ensuring the long-term orientation of the family businesses in the context of a developing country. The family is situated in a broader social context, and therefore the business is embedded in the family’s social networks that cannot be detached from the country’s social context. The developing country context is important because of its culture, politics, and history that differ from a developed world.In this thesis, the continuity of family businesses is understood as: (1) sustaining the family’s legacy coming of the founder’s achievements, (2) succession, sustaining the business beyond the founder’s tenure, and ensuring that both the family and business stay together, and (3) longevity, ensuring a long-term orientation which is a crucial characteristic of all family businesses. This last category is relevant to this thesis because long-term orientation is achieved through futurity, persistence, and continuity patterns. This thesis focuses on continuity as daily and short-term survival to ensure the long-term orientation of a family business. Different theoretical lenses including portfolio literature, socialization literature, and commitment literature were tried for in this thesis. Commitment literature was found binding both portfolio and socialization literature. And therefore, commitment literature was considered reliable for understanding the challenges of family businesses’ continuity. Using commitment literature, this study uses data collected from founder-led business families in Rwanda and investigates how the commitments of actors at multiple levels affects the day-by-day survival of family businesses.The thesis follows a qualitative approach with multiple cases of research design. It uses data from six founder-led business families in Rwanda. It follows the interview approach and uses the INVIVO program to code the transcribed data. The phenomenon of how the family built its business’ continuity is investigated following a multi-level analysis, that is, how each level affected the continuity of the family business or individual, family, and business levels in a business family. The individual level has founders, next generation members, women, in-laws, and non-family employees (Sharma, 2004). It uses the grounded theory for elaborating on matters arising when investigating the continuity of family businesses (see Figure 6.1). A family business’ continuity model is built to map ‘how’ a family builds its business continuity as well as ‘what’ is the expected role played by each level (see Figure 7.1), and a day-by-day continuity model of the family business is crafted to understand the mechanisms behind its day-by-day continuity (see Figure 7.2).The findings of this thesis show clearly that family businesses in Rwanda are focused on preserving their firms for retaining the family legacy, but unfortunately, they are unable to plan for a long-term legacy. I posit that short-term survival, repeatedly, will lead to long-term survival and, subsequently, to longevity. The findings highlight the role of the specific context and associated cultural aspects of continuity in family businesses. The three aggregate dimensions developed present three main challenges to the continuity of family businesses in Rwanda. First, due to Rwandan cultural obligations of inheritance by the next generation, both the founding generation and the next generations are committed to family businesses’ continuity. Unfortunately, there is a detachment among generations in Rwanda, which is contrary to the cooperation expected in family businesses. Second, the uncertainties and inertia resulting from the absence of co-ownership and the inter-generational distance due to cultural aspects lead to separate and parallel planning for businesses’ continuity. Third, when it comes to the involvement in the management of family businesses, inter-generational conflicts and uncertainties result in weak family embeddedness that may push some family members away from the family businesses. This situation is a challenge because the absence of co-management between the incumbents and the next generation is abnormal since both parties, like dancing partners, need to manage the transition.Ignoring the three challenges that they face, business families in Rwanda strive for continuity through (1) created and protected family legacy, (2) created inner cohesion among the next generation’s members, (3) in-laws and non-family members assimilated into the family business, (4) the family forming norms for succession, governance, and order-conflict processes, and (5) the family business’ resilience maintained for the family and community. Missing this mindset of planning for the long-term explains why many business families in Rwanda fail to continue after the founder’s tenure. There are many reasons for not planning for the long-term. In this thesis, the factors in a family business’ continuity are linked to (a) the family setting and the social capital of both direct and invisible members that ensures on-going activities of the family business; (b) the cultural setting related to inheritance management, heirship/legal ownership succession, family chieftaincy retention, and leadership succession, and (c) the institutional uncertainty and Ubuntu or a communitarianist nature of family firms as a way of living in a developing country making it difficult to plan for the long term.This study contributes to an understanding of the heterogeneity of contexts in family business research. It will also assist owners and practitioners operating in changing environments to design informed continuity plans that have the potential to ensure the survival of family businesses in Rwanda. Theoretically, the study concludes that a commitment to continuing family businesses is shared by different levels in business families, but each level has one primary form of commitment and many forms of secondary commitment for the continuity of family businesses. There is a fluidity in commitment among multiple levels in business families.
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| 6. |
- Waldkirch, Matthias
(author)
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From professional interactions to relational work : Investigating relationships around non-family CEOs in family firms
- 2018
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Relationships constitute a central and significant part of our lives and form the very foundation on which organizations are built. They provide meaning to work, create connections, and ultimately shape organizations. This dissertation adds to the growing literature on workplace relationships by studying the chief executive officer (CEO) in an organizational form that is inherently built on relationships: the family firm. Focusing on the introduction of a non-family CEO in a family firm, this dissertation investigates the meaning of relationships for non-family CEOs, the work they perform, and the organizations they reside in. It builds on a diverse set of relational perspectives and uses conceptual approaches and in-depth longitudinal case research.The first paper reviews, organizes and extends the literature on non-family CEOs by using gap-spotting and assumption-challenging. The second paper outlines how relationships in the triad between a non-family CEO and members of the current and next generation family owners influence whether a CEO stays or leaves the family firm. The third paper investigates how family firms adopt professional practices and outlines four modes of professionalization, showing how family firms‘ overprofessionalize’. The fourth paper follows a CEO succession and reorganization in a family firm over 16 months and investigates how contesting processes of job design and crafting change and create job systems.This dissertation contributes by introducing relational work as a core aspect of a CEO’s work, by extending our knowledge about non-family CEOs in family firms and by challenging the understanding of professionalization in family firms. It also contributes to practice by providing guidelines for structuring relations between family owners and (prospective) non-family CEOs.
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| 7. |
- Zehra, Khizran
(author)
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Resource mobilization among informal entrepreneurs : A case of event planning industry of Pakistan
- 2018
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation studies resource mobilization among informal entrepreneurs. It combines the resource mobilization perspective with insights from social capital and human capital theory to understand the resource mobilization activities of informal entrepreneurs, focusing on the founding period and the early years of existence of informal ventures. Empirically the study is based on 15 cases from event planning industry of Pakistan. It primarily uses semi-structured interviews along with observations and secondary documents. The within and cross-case coding are aggregated into a conceptual model that paves the way to understanding inter-organizational gains through informal entrepreneurial networks. These informal entrepreneurial networks are largely based on competitor’s networks that support the exchange of resources, such as the exchange of knowledge, raw material, ideas, opportunities, etc. The new insights contributed from the findings are that resource mobilization is not competitive but rather collaborative among informal entrepreneurs. This collaborative resource mobilization is mainly based on activities like competitor’s collaboration, collaborative knowledge sharing through informal venturing, for the advancement of business goals at founding and in later stages. Collaborative resource mobilization is an alternative to competitive resource mobilization, whereby the flow of resources in the networks remains competitive when it comes to business rivalry. The study contributes to the role of social and human capital in resource mobilizing activities that improve the synergistic effects contributing to the readiness of informal entrepreneurs. Trust and reciprocal exchange of resources among competitors act as a major strengthening factor in promoting collaborative resource mobilization among informal entrepreneurs. It also contributes to the informal entrepreneurship literature and suggests that informal entrepreneurship should not be considered as marginalized activities, but rather a platform where the considerable potential of creative entrepreneurial activity is present.
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| 8. |
- Fitz-Koch, Sarah
(author)
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Who am I, and if so, how many? Identity dynamics in agricultural entrepreneurship
- 2020
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Identity matters and identity is hailed increasingly as central to fully apprehending entrepreneurship. Identity is inherent to entrepreneurship because entrepreneurs establish and grow their ventures based on their identities. Hence, identity infuses entrepreneurial activities with meaning and guidance. An identity perspective in entrepreneurship allows us to move beyond traditional views embedded in economic rationality when seeking to understand entrepreneurial motivation and behavior in the agricultural sector. It emphasizes that farming entrepreneurs think, behave and act in ways that they deem appropriate for themselves ‒ notably because farmers are explored as individuals who are sensitive to their personal values and beliefs, which are crucial to identity. Each farmer has her/his own version of what it means to be a good farmer, which influences her/his entrepreneurial behavior.This dissertation is situated in the growing literature on identities in entrepreneurship that has provided new insights and developed theory that helps explain the rich heterogeneity of entrepreneurs’ characteristics and motivations as well as how entrepreneurs’ identities are linked to decision-making and behavior. However, there is insufficient analytical use of the dynamics of entrepreneurs’ multiple identities in existing scholarly work. This problem is critical because there are potentially multiple salient identities to entrepreneurs that evolve and/or change over time and that consequently influence entrepreneurial endeavors and outcomes and that need to be managed by entrepreneurs. It is, moreover, critical because identity might not only influence entrepreneurial behavior and outcomes but in turn might also be influenced by entrepreneurial endeavors. Given these limitations, the purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the dynamics of entrepreneurs’ identities over time when pursuing entrepreneurship.To fulfill this purpose, the dissertation builds on a longitudinal and qualitative theorybuilding research approach that allows actors under study to be followed over an extended period of time and identity dynamics and context to be captured in greater detail. Opportunities for researching identity dynamics in entrepreneurship become especially apparent as we look at farming. Social and structural changes in the agricultural sector result in farmers’ enactment of various social roles and/or social group affiliations. At the same time, the majority of farming takes place in the family context in which family farms are transitioned over many generations. In such a complex environment, the development and the psychological experience of managing multiple identities can constitute both challenges and opportunities for farmers.Overall, the dissertation contributes to the emerging inquiry on identities in entrepreneurship by providing novel theoretical models of founder identity development Who am I, and if so, how many? Identity Dynamics in Agricultural Entrepreneurship Abstract and processes of identity management and their influence on individually and on organizationally relevant outcomes. The findings of the dissertation also contribute to the literature on contextualizing entrepreneurship by providing key contextual dimensions of the agricultural sector and showing how studying these dimensions can illuminate less well-understood aspects of entrepreneurship theory. Practically, this dissertation presents obstacles to, and opportunities for, developing an entrepreneurial identity and a more entrepreneurial approach in the agricultural sector.
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