Family Owned Business Institute

Research Scholar's Abstracts 2008 - Sanjay Goel

Stakeholder Management, Ethical Behavior, and Performance of Family Businesses: A Systems View
Sanjay Goel
2008

Family businesses have been lauded as organizations that pursue long term goals, have greater discretion, develop a close-knit community internally, invest in enduring relationships externally, and may be socially responsible (e.g. Miller & Breton-Miller, 2005, 2006; Carney, 2005; Dyer & Whetten, 2006), whose founders and family managers are likely to take a stewardship view of managing family business assets. Family businesses have greater discretion in their actions, as well as the ability to employ idiosyncratic criteria and goals different from a profit-maximizing firm (Carney, 2005; Chrisman, Chua, & Litz, 2004). Grounded in systems view of family business that views family businesses as comprising of intersecting family, business, and ownership systems, I aim to develop a conceptual model of stakeholder management and ethical behavior in family businesses that identifies specific constructs from the separate and interacting parts of these subsystems. The development of a conceptual empirically testable model would spur research in this area, and would also be of great significance to family business owners, managers, their advisors and others interested in the development of socially responsible and ethically led family businesses.