Clay Dibrell

Natural Environment, Market Orientation, and Firm Innovativeness: An Organizational Life Cycle Perspective

Drawing upon the corporate social responsibility literature, we investigate the moderating effects of the natural environment and the stage of an organizations life cycle on the market orientation to firm innovativeness relationship. Through 229 owners or chief executive officer respondents, our results establish evidence of (1) a positive linkage between market orientation and firm innovativeness; (2) natural environmental policy positively moderating the market orientation to firm innovativeness relationship; and (3) organizational life cycle negatively moderating market orientation to innovativeness. Our findings suggest ventures characterized as being early in the organizational life cycle are more likely to have a positive environmental policy toward the natural environment leading to a competitive advantage through firm innovativeness.

Social Issues in the Family Enterprise

In this introduction, we discuss social issue research in the management and family business literatures, focusing on ethics, corporate social responsibility, and philanthropic practices of family enterprises. Next, we introduce and highlight four articles accepted for publication. The editorial concludes by presenting future research questions at the social issues—family business interface. Our review of 35 articles, as well as those included in this Special Issue, suggest that family businesses are more attuned and attentive to social issues and stakeholders than nonfamily business. Noneconomic motivations (e.g., reputation, socioemotional wealth, and stewardship) appear particularly salient to family enterprises.

Stewardship Climate Scale: An Assessment of Reliability and Validity

While stewardship theory is often used to explain family business outcomes, no prior empirical study has used a validated measure of stewardship. We, therefore, surveyed 846 managers and subordinates from 221 family and nonfamily firms in the United States and Australia to develop a reliable and valid Stewardship Climate Scale. We found family firms have a stronger stewardship climate and the relationship between stewardship climate and performance is mediated by innovativeness, and the effects of stewardship are stronger in family firms, confirming the value of stewardship theory, and our scale, when explaining family business outcomes.

The Effects of Goal Orientation and Client Feedback on the Adaptive Behaviors of Family Enterprise Advisors

Family enterprise advisors work on complex and unique problems for their family enterprise clients. Little attention has been given to these professionals and their abilities to provide innovative solutions. In this study, our aim is to understand more about family enterprise advisors (N = 231). To achieve this objective, we hypothesize that the effects of advisor goal orientation (i.e., learning orientation, proving orientation, and avoidance orientation) on adaptive behaviors (i.e., personal bricolage and individual innovative behavior) are mediated by the quality of feedback received from clients. The results indicate that quality of feedback partially mediates the relationships between goal orientation and these behaviors. We conclude by providing a practitioner model explaining how advisors may adapt to different family enterprise client role environments.

Family firms and entrepreneurship: Contradiction or synonym?

(JSBE) Special Issue was motivated by increasing intellectual curiosity from within the entrepreneurship academic commu-nity to study entrepreneurial phenomenon in a family business context. Family enterprises dominate the commercial landscape in all economies, and interest in the unique challenges facing this business genre is growing. In many family firms, ownership and management are maintained across several generations, and a key challenge for long-term survival is to sustain the entrepreneurial spirit of the founding generation of entrepreneurs (Littunen and Hyrsky, 2000). All firms regularly need to renew their way of doing business in order to stay competitive, as they risk losing their entrepreneurial capacity when they mature (Kellermanns and Eddleston, 2006). However, family firms face many additional chal-lenges with regard to entrepreneurship (Zahra, Hayton and Salvato, 2004). Some scholars see family firms as conservative, introverted, inflexible and lacking en-trepreneurial spirit (i.e., a contradiction), while others argue the opposite and view family firms as a setting where entrepreneurship is enabled to flourish (i.e., a synonym). There is increasing evidence, including in the manuscripts in this edition, that families in business are robust sources of entrepreneurial activity (Naldi et al., 2007). It is apparent that family business and entrepreneurship are not contradictory; that family businesses

Is an Efficacious Operation a Safe Operation: The Role of Operational Practices in Worker Safety Outcomes

One of the most fundamental indicators of a facilitys social sustainability is the health and safety of its workers. Yet the literature provides little guidance for engineering managers, workers or researchers trying to understand how practices designed to enhance productivity will impact the safety of operational workers. The present research addresses that gap by simultaneously examining operational “best” practices such as quality management and just-in-time and performance outcomes such as productivity and worker safety. To control for the myriad of potential problems with self-reports of worker safety performance, we match secondary data provided by the state of Oregon with managers self-reported responses to operational practices. The results show that the relationship between operational practices and safety outcomes is nuanced with just-in-time harming worker safety, an impact that can be mitigated by the adoption of team-based work up to a point, as the relationship between JIT and team-based work is U-shaped.

Life Settlements From the Perspective of Institutional, Real Options, and Stewardship Theories

As families seek alternative forms of financial capital without putting the family business at risk, life settlements are gaining the interest of family businesses and scholars. This commentary draws upon institutional theory, real options theory, and stewardship theory to provide a foundation to better understand life settlements and to complement the work articulated by Adams (2009).

Attention, Action, and Greenwash in Family-Influenced Firms? Evidence From Polluting Industries

Drawing on complementary theoretical perspectives, we investigate whether and to what extent family-influenced firms differ from their nonfamily counterparts in terms of the relationship between managerial attention to natural environmental issues and concomitant environmental actions. Using data from letters to shareholders and the KLD database, we investigate 97 firms in five polluting industries. Our findings indicate that family firms positively moderate the relationship between top managers’ attention to natural environmental issues and proactive environmental action. Conversely, nonfamily firms demonstrate less proactive environmental action as their attention to environmental issues increases, suggesting greenwashing. We argue that attention and action behaviors in family firms are intimately connected with their desire to preserve socioemotional wealth and indicate a lower propensity to greenwash, whereas nonfamily firms’ short-term financial objectives may motivate a different response pattern.

Fostering strategic awareness at an organization’s boundary

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of strategy messages emanating from both top and middle/supervisory managers regarding five different aspects of strategy on strategic awareness among boundary personnel.Design/methodology/approach – The results come from a survey of bank tellers and customer service representatives within a single large regional bank.Findings – The findings support a differential main effect on strategic awareness among boundary personnel depending on the source of messages, whether top management or middle management. More interestingly, there appears to be an interaction effect between the two sources regarding which will be the dominant information source for boundary personnel.Research limitations/implications – The survey data were collected within a single banking institution at one time point.Practical implications – The results provide useful information concerning the efficacy of messages concerning strategy from middle and top management in organi...

Learning off the Job: Examining Part-time Entrepreneurs as Innovative Employees:

In this paper, we explain and examine how engaging in part-time entrepreneurship (creating and managing side businesses while remaining employed for wages in existing organizations) uniquely positions individuals to exhibit innovative behavior in employee roles. To study this phenomenon, we integrate the literatures on entrepreneurial learning, knowledge and learning transfer, and employee innovation. We hypothesize that part-time entrepreneurship provides an opportunity for individuals to acquire knowledge and skills conducive to enacting innovative behaviors as employees. Multilevel regression analysis of a sample of 1,221 employee responses across 137 organizational units provides evidence to support our positive transferal hypothesis. Further, we find that individual differences in goal orientations and work-unit climates for innovation strengthen these relationships.