Elina Meliou

Explaining leadership in family firms: Reflexivity, social conditioning and institutional complexity

Research on leadership in family firms has concentrated on the drivers of performance viewed in the context of reciprocal family and business logics, family or non-family CEOs operating within different family governance and administrative settings. The explanatory aim is to ascertain the optimum configuration of elements for achieving improved economic rents so the benefits of family loyalty do not negatively impact firm performance. Our thesis challenges this research, which treats family leadership as a contingent outcome of the governance and administrative contexts within which family and non-family CEOs make strategic choices. We argue that family leadership studies restrict explanations of action to a narrow bandwidth because leadership is effectively black-boxed when it is treated as an outcome of these contingent relations. To overcome this limitation we propose a nested framing of social conditioning that explains the connections between actors, organizations and multiple social orders (and not just family and business). Our contribution is to theorize family leadership in the context of multiple ‘social context – personal preference’ modes; that is, leadership is conceived through reflexivity, which is the personal process mediating the effects of our circumstances upon our actions.

Career Development in the Hospitality Industry in Greece: Implications for Human Resource Practices

This study expands research on career development and succession. The purpose of this article is to understand the beliefs of frontline employees in the hospitality industry in regards to the meaning of career. Based on Social Representation Theory, the article highlights the importance of adopting a social constructionist perspective in order to identify individuals’ subjective experiences of career. Data was collected in luxury hotel chains in Athens, Greece using a word association method. Findings underline important instrumental as well as intrinsic values of career. Implications are suggested for developing practices for effective human resources career management.

The mental health treatment team: are men or women better team players?

Purpose – Collaboration among professionals is essential for effective patient care, but gender stereotyping and discrimination practices in the health care environment may hinder effective teamwork. This study aims to investigate professional attitudes toward teamwork in a psychiatric setting with a particular emphasis on gender. The paper examines gender differences in attitudes among all professionals on a team and identifies gender differences among professionals within the same speciality, with particular attention to doctors and nurses.Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected in the mental health hospital of Attiki, Greece. In total, 151 doctors, nurses and allied health professionals completed a self‐reported questionnaire.Findings – The paper finds that females appear to be more receptive to teamwork: all doctors have similarities in their attitudes toward teamwork, but females reported stronger agreement on the values and culture of the team. Several differences appeared in male and fema...

Relational practices and reflexivity: Exploring the responses of women entrepreneurs to changing household dynamics

This qualitative study explores how and why women, positioned as mothers, wives, or carers, navigate changing household dynamics, related to care and reproductive resources, and become entrepreneurial. Drawing on relational reflexivity, we show how women’s embodied, intimate relations with important others in the household form the focal point for entrepreneurial activities and offer evidence of their entrepreneurial agency. Our analysis reveals the emergence of three relational practices that result in a new venture as the entrepreneurial response of women. We critically evaluate normative analyses on gender, entrepreneurship, and household.

Relationally reflexive women: Household strategies of female entrepreneurs as social change

Feminist scholars have argued that entrepreneurship as a social phenomenon can lead to varieties of outcomes, which reveal aspects of social complexity not readily apparent in studies of economic man (Calas et al, 2009). Our purpose is to consider the actions of women confronting personal discontinuities as examples of entrepreneurship; we are most interested in how they meet these discontinuities in the context of the gendered structures shaping their lives, creating opportunities and starting new ventures, which, we argue, exposes the reflexive choices of women living at the family, occupational and household nexus (Alsos, Carter and Ljunggren, 2014, Wallace, 2002). Making the necessary choices and shaping these into a way of life are relationally reflexive endeavors, which depend on relational reflexivity (Donati and Archer, 2015: 126). In this paper we analyse the household strategies elaborated by women in order to set up a business that enables them to sustain the “relational goods” generated in the household.