Publications

The main research objective of this dissertation is to expand our knowledge surrounding family owner – nonfamily CEO dynamics in private family firms. Based on three empirical studies, this dissertation sheds light on different mechanisms that promote or hinder the family owner - nonfamily CEO collaboration. More specifically, we uncovered and detailed the role and nature of relationships, CEO personality, and the dark side of psychological ...

The studies on the relationship between the depth of the entrepreneur's experience and firm growth shows inconsistent and inconclusive results. A comprehensive understanding of this matter is especially valuable in the context of family business successions, given that many companies seem to be unsuccessful in conquering the difficulties surrounding a succession. The reason is the fact that successors often lack experience when taking over the ...

Intra-familial principalprincipal conflict are a relevant agency problem in privately held family firms. These conflicts of interest commonly occur between active and passive family shareholders, and require remedies different from those that deal with principal-agent conflicts. This article empirically examines whether or not firms use dividends as instruments to cope with conflicts of interest between active and passive family shareholders and ...

Purpose/topic of research This paper introduces a conceptual model discussing agency consequences of a nonfamily CEO in private family firms. Private family firms have a unique ownership structure in that their founders or descendants are among the largest shareholders (concentrated ownership), often manage the firm and usually have a seat on the board of directors. Consequently, agency theorists (e.g. Jensen and Meckling, 1976; Fama and Jensen, ...

Purpose -The importance of formal human resource(HR) practices is widely recognized in management literature, but under-researched in the small business and family firm domain. Previous research indicates that family firms rely more on informal HR practices, based on social networks. However, given the heterogeneity of family firms, one cannot assume that all family firms are reluctant to formalize their HR. As the CEO is the key decision maker ...

Tax aggressiveness is defined as downward management of taxable income through tax planning activities which can be legal or illegal or may lie in between. Given that taxes are an important cost for each firm, tax aggressiveness may be desired by its shareholders. In this paper, we investigate to what extent CEO ownership and governance (e.g. composition of the board of directors) affect tax aggressive behavior decisions in private family firms. ...

Many organizational change efforts don’t live up to their expectations, with inefficiencies in the interaction process between organizational actors as one of the main potential reasons for this failure. Therefore, this paper will focus on the impact of interaction processes on change within the specific organizational context of family firms. Family firms are particularly interesting for organizational change research since they have several ...

The objective of this dissertation is to enhance the understanding of compensation and dividend policies in private family firms. By doing so, this dissertation takes a small step along the path to fill some of the research gaps at the intersection of research in finance, human resource management and family businesses. The overall research question can be described as follows: What determines the compensation and dividend policies in ...

More and more family firms open their capital for outside investors, yet existing studies mainly conclude that family firms are more reluctant than nonfamily firms to hand over control to outside investors. In this study, we build on an organizational identification perspective to explore why family firms differ in their attitudes toward outside investors. We hypothesize that family members who identify strongly with their firms are less willing ...