No abstract

The causes of the unprecedented dwindling survival rate of family businesses in South-Eastern Nigeria are still not clear to both researchers and practitioners. Despite theoretically including employee engagement and organisational cynicism as the causes, the crux of the argument is that the literature is scant. Worst still, in the few existing studies, family and non-family businesses were lumped together. Consequently, this study seeks to investigate the moderating role of organisational cynicism in the relationship between employee engagement and family business performance. The study used vigour, dedication and absorption as the dimensions of employee engagement, while financial and non-financial performances were employed as the dimensions of family business performance. The study adopted a cross-sectional research design and a simple random sampling technique. The generated data were employed to test the research hypotheses based on (Baron and Kenny, 1986) approach to testing moderation. It was found that organisational cynicism can increase or decrease the relationship between the dimensions of employee engagement and the dimensions of family business performance. The study recommends fostering more resilient, inspired and immersed employees through workplace reinvention. To validate and generalise these results, further studies are advocated in different contexts.

developing countries (Williamson, 2004). The move resulted to structuralism given way for neoliberalism and subsequently, a shift towards the view that foreign investment was good for development.Prior to that, many developing countries thought that opening up the market economy, FDI and trade were irrelevant and could be counterproductive. Although, there was assumption that the economic rationale for policy changes that favored trade liberalization and FDI was based on the belief that FDI bridges the 'idea gaps' between the rich and poor nations, beyond its attraction of technological transfers and spillovers to poor countries (HarunaDanja, 2012).