Mariasole Bannò

Family Business Characteristics and the Approach to HRM in Overseas Ventures

This paper provides new evidence on the relationship between family business (FB) and human resource management (HRM) abroad. Our analysis provides two main results. First, not all organizational attributes of exert the same effect on the approach to abroad. Whereas participation of family members in the board of directors displays no significant impact, ownership and family managerial models favor the exploitation of the human resources supplied by the parent company. In contrast, the involvement of young successors favors an explorative attitude. Second, a multidimensional approach has better explanatory power compared with a dichotomous classification of FBs.

Family Firm Types Based on the Level of Professionalism of the Top Management Team

This chapter responds to the calls for identifying different categories of family firms. The authors contribute to the literature by extending family firm typologies. To reach this goal, they introduce the construct of the professionalism of the top management team (TMT). In order to expose the multidimensional nature of the TMT, they first review the literature on TMTs based on Hambrick’s and Mason’s (Acad Manag Rev 9, 2:193–206, 1984) demographic variables. Thus, they conduct a cluster analysis on an original dataset of 500 Italian family firms to identify the different “types” of family firms based on a multidimensional conceptualization of TMT professionalization.

L'efficacia degli incentivi per la crescita internazionale

Public incentives have often been criticized for being ineffective, but there is still a lack of specific, rigorous analyses to either support or debunk that claim. In fact, no evidence has been provided so far on the role and effectiveness of financial incentives for outward internationalization. The paper aims to close that gap by evaluating the effects of such incentives on firm performance. We develop an empirical analysis using information on the population of Italian firms that received at least an incentive for international growth in the 1996-2008 period. The results of our analysis, after checking for selection bias and causality, show that financial incentives do help younger and smaller companies to increase their productivity, but are less effective in influencing their dimensional growth.