Defense Date
Summer 6-23-2015
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Management
Department
Business Administration
Committee Chair/First Advisor
Dr. Torsten M. Pieper
Committee Member or Co-Chair
Dr. Joseph H. Astrachan
Reader
Franz W. Kellermanns
Abstract
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 (Seijts, Latham, Tasa, & Latham, 2004, Simon, 1964). 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 idiosyncratic to each family business. The purpose of this research was to begin the process of developing 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 twenty-one goals spread among six latent constructs.
Included in
Business Administration, Management, and Operations Commons, Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations Commons, Management Sciences and Quantitative Methods Commons