Measuring Family Business Performance: A Holistic, Idiosyncratic Approach Ralph I. Williams Jr. (DBA Student), Torsten M. Pieper (Committee Chair), Joseph H. Astrachan (Committee Member) and Franz W. Kellermanns (Reader)
For any type of organization, performance represents the measure of outcomes, goals, and aspirations vital to various organization stakeholders; thus performance is an important research variable. Family businesses are different from non- family businesses in that the family subsystem and the business subsystem overlap and interact to form the family business system. The desired outcomes, goals, and aspirations of each family business are a product of its particular family and business sub-systems. Thus, in family business, especially privately owned entities, performance is of particular interest since families can set their goals in their own ways, which may go well beyond financial outcomes. Despite notable recent advances, especially on conceptual grounds, current approaches to measuring performance in family business are limited by a focus solely on financial measures, and current approaches fail to acknowledge that goals are particular (idiosyncratic) to each family business. This research lays a foundation for the development of a performance measurement scale that is holistic – including the entire set of family business goals, both financial and non-financial – and considers the idiosyncratic nature of family businesses. The present study produced a family business performance measurement scale that employs 21 goals spread among six latent constructs. Overview
12 | DBA Summary
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