Governance of Family Firm Internationalization: A Family Perspective

Abstract

Over the past decades, the study of family firm internationalization has generated considerable scholarly attention (Debellis et al., 2020). Family firms dominate the global economic landscape and internationalization is widely acknowledged as an important determinant of their sustained performance worldwide (De Massis et al., 2018). In particular, private family firms’ internationalization is distinct from their nonfamily counterparts because of their idiosyncratic governance nature, since ownership and management are often vested in the hands of the family (Arregle et al., 2017). Yet, extant research has offered varied and at times incompatible findings on how family involvement impacts internationalization (Arregle et al., 2021; Pukall & Calabro, 2014). On the one hand, family firm attributes such as a long-term orientation and speed of decision-making are important resources for international expansion. On the other hand, family firms are often pictured as strategically inert and conservative due to deeply rooted traditions and the fear of losing family control (Arregle et al., 2017). Accordingly, the objective of this dissertation is to fill some of the prevailing family-level gaps in the family business internationalization literature and lay the groundwork for future studies. The studies in this dissertation advocate for interdisciplinary research and use novel insights from established family science theories (Jaskiewicz et al., 2017), multiteam systems theory (Mathieu et al., 2002; Zaccaro et al., 2012), and the attention-based view (Ocasio, 1997) to investigate the complex dynamics in the governance of family firms and their internationalization strategies. Specifically, this dissertation provides a family perspective to family firm internationalization from three different governance angles. First, family firms’ management is addressed by exploring the impact of family CEOs on internationalization and how this relationship is moderated by family communication patterns. Second, this dissertation offers a novel conceptualization of family firms’ board of directors and explains how the family and the board essentially comprise a multiteam system and jointly affect internationalization decisions, as a result of carrying out specific shared tasks. Third, the dissertation demonstrates that family firms’ internationalization could be a direct reflection of the functioning of the family itself due to families’ various ways of intrinsic functioning that spill over into the business processes and strategic decisions.