VSSER25 Session 3 Summary

The 4 papers from #VSSER25 Session 3 covers several aspects of family firms, from leadership and performance to strategic behavior and dysfunctional actions. Amore, Garofalo, and Minichilli (2014) investigate how interactions between women in governance and CEO positions affect corporate profitability in family firms, suggesting that while lone female CEOs might face challenges, their performance could improve with greater interaction with female directors. This study emphasizes the importance of female interactions at the top level and uses a comprehensive dataset of family firms to conduct its analysis, accounting for different CEO structures and potential overlaps in roles. Bennedsen et al. (2007) focus on the causal effect of family CEOs on firm performance in Denmark, utilizing the gender of the departing CEO's firstborn child as an exogenous instrument to address the endogeneity of succession decisions. Their findings indicate that while family successions often occur in smaller and more profitable firms, the appointment of a family CEO can negatively impact firm performance, and they also observed differences in the characteristics of family versus non-family CEOs. Chevy et al. (2021) shift focus to strategic persistence in family firms, defining it as the consistent pattern of resource allocation over time, and hypothesize that family firms with family leadership exhibit greater strategic persistence compared to those without. This research analyzes a sample of S&P 1500 manufacturing firms to examine strategic behavior over an extended period. Finally, Kidwell et al. (2024) provide a comprehensive review of the literature on dysfunctional behavior in family firms across various academic disciplines, highlighting a wide range of negative actions and their antecedents and consequences at different levels. Their analysis reveals that while much research focuses on conflict, more attention could be paid to the impact of pre-firm family interactions and external pressures, and they propose a multi-level framework to guide future research in this area, noting that perceptions of dysfunction can vary among stakeholders.