Portfolio Entrepreneurship in Family Firms: A Resource-based Perspective

The phenomenon of portfolio entrepreneurship has attracted considerable scholarly attention and is particularly relevant in the family fi rm context. However, there is a lack of knowledge of the process through which portfolio entrepreneurship develops in family firms. We address this gap by analyzing four in-depth, longitudinal family firm case studies from Europe and Latin America. Using a resource-based perspective, we identify six distinct resource categories that are relevant to the portfolio entrepreneurship process. Furthermore, we reveal that their importance varies across time. Our resulting resource-based process model of portfolio entrepreneurship in family firms makes valuable contributions to both theory and practice.

Entrepreneurship in Family Firms and Beyond

To explain family firms‘ generation-spanning success, scholars have increasingly been investigating entrepreneurship-related phenomena as corresponding antecedents. Entrepreneurship research beyond the family firm context has been growing significantly over the last decades as well. In both areas, however, numerous important research gaps exist. Referring to entrepreneurship in the family firm context, there is a need to enrich literature on succession/transgenerational entrepreneurship, portfolio entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial strategies and orientations. In the general entrepreneurship context, further insights are needed into employees’ entrepreneurial behavior and individuals’ entrepreneurial intentions. The six journal articles, two conference papers, and two book chapters that are included in this Cumulative Postdoctoral Thesis address those gaps and provide valuable contributions to the respective bodies of literature. As a whole, the publications significantly advance existing knowledge in two very relevant academic fields and open up promising avenues for future research.

Family Portfolio Entrepreneurship

This paper seeks to extend our understanding of the growing field of Portfolio Entrepreneurship, the simultaneous ownership and engagement in several business activities (Westhead & Wright 1998; Carter & Ram 2003). Portfolio entrepreneurship has been identified as an important factor in both new venture creation and the economic landscape in general (Rosa & Scott 1996; 1999). We follow Carter and Ram's (2003) call to explore portfolio entrepreneurship within the family context. Specifically we address the why (cause) and how (process) of family portfolio entrepreneurship through comparative qualitative cases.

Long-term Success of Family Firms: Investigating Specific Aspects of Firm-level Entrepreneurship and Individual-level Antecedents

Long-term success of family firms is of utmost social and economic importance. Three of its determinants are in the center of this Dissertation: firmlevel entrepreneurial orientation (EO), managers' entrepreneurial behavior, and value-creating attitudes of non-family employees. Each determinant and respective research gaps are addressed by one paper of this cumulative dissertation. Referring to firm-level EO, scholars claim that EO is a main antecedent to firms' both short- and long-term success. However, family firms seem to be successful across generations despite rather low levels of EO. The first paper addresses this paradox by investigating EO patterns of long-lived family firms in three Swiss case studies. The main finding is that the key to success is not to be as entrepreneurially as possible all the time, but to continuously adapt the EO profile depending on internal and external factors. Moreover, the paper suggest new subcategories to different EO dimensions. With regard to entrepreneurial behavior of managers, there is a lack of knowledge how individual-level and organizational level factors affect its evolvement. The second paper addresses this gap by investigating a sample of 403 middle-level managers from both family and non-family firms. It introduces psychological ownership of managers as individual-level antecedent and investigates the interaction with organizational factors. As a central insight, management support is found to strengthen the psychological ownership-entrepreneurial behavior relationship. The third paper is based on the fact that employees' justice perceptions are established antecedents of value-creating employee attitudes such as affective commitment and job satisfaction. Even though family firms are susceptible to nonfamily employees´ perceptions of injustice, corresponding research is scarce. Moreover, the mechanism connecting justice perceptions and positive outcomes is still unclear. Addressing these gaps, the analysis of a sample of 310 non-family employees reveals that psychological ownership is a mediator in the relationships between distributive justice perceptions and both affective commitment and job satisfaction. Altogether, the three papers offer valuable contributions to family business literature with respect to EO, entrepreneurial behavior, and value-creating employee attitudes. Thus, they increase current understanding about important determinants of family firms' long-term success, while opening up numerous ways of future research.