Antonio Duréndez

Managerial behaviour of small and medium‐sized family businesses: an empirical study

Purpose – The aim of the present study is to test the main differences between private small/medium‐sized family businesses and non‐family businesses with regard to management variables such as: strategy, strategic planning, managers training and professionalism and financial techniques implementation.Design/methodology/approach – In this empirical research, we use a sample of 639 small and medium‐sized industrial firms, distributed in 456 family and 183 non‐family firms, with the intention of determining whether family SMEs possess specific structural characteristics distinct from non‐family ones. The data collection technique used was a questionnaire obtained from a postal survey, and addressed to the manager of the company.Findings – Results show that managers of family firms use some management tools such as management accounting systems and cash budgets for the decision making process and also give less importance to strategic planning and personnel training programmes as a competitiveness factor.Re...

Innovative Culture, Management Control Systems and Performance in Young SMEs

We identify organizational culture and assess the relationship between organizational culture, management control systems (MCS) use and their effects on performance. With this purpose, we carry out an empirical analysis on a sample of 89 young SMEs. Results show that young firms’ predominant culture is clan, whereas adhocratic culture is less relevant. Additionally, we found some evidence that the innovative culture (mix of clan and adhocratic culture) and the use of MCS have positive effect on firm performance.

The effect of accounting information systems on the performance of Mexican micro, small and medium-sized family firms: An exploratory study for the hospitality sector

This study analyses how the implementation of accounting and financial information and management control systems affect the performance of family and non-family micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in the hospitality sector in Quintana Roo State (Mexico). The authors carried out a cross-sectional study with a sample of 122 family and non-family tourism MSMEs (composed of 72 family and 50 non-family firms). A survey was used to collect the data. The results show that managers of family firms in the hospitality sector use less accounting and financial information in their decisions than those of non-family firms. The findings also imply that hospitality family firms maintain less formalized management control systems than non-family firms in terms of the timeliness, aggregation and integration of economic and financial information in the decision-making process.