Although family business survey research is growing in volume and publication in highly regarded management journals, we do not yet have evidence on the usual response rates in this research and on the factors that impact these response rates. This paper addresses these voids and finds that the average response rates of family business survey studies published in seven prominent outlets amount to 21%. We also find that the response rates have declined significantly over time and that the size of the survey population and the establishment of contacts with survey addressees before sending out questionnaires are significantly associated with response rates. Such precontacts and reminders seem less fruitful for family respondents than for non-family respondents.

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Stable relationships with suppliers have been portrayed in the literature as having several economic and sustainability benefits. However, while a buyer firm's transformational leadership can be theorized to improve stable supplier relations, recent global business trends such as automation and globalization may endanger this stability. In this study, we therefore analyze the relationship between a buyer firm's transformational leadership and supplier relational stability and examine whether it is moderated by the buyer firm being affected by automation and globalization. We test our assumptions using data from a survey of German Mittelstand firms and confirm the moderating roles of automation and globalization. Our study therefore provides an updated and more nuanced understanding of how transformational leadership can affect supplier relational stability. Our findings also provide indications of how sustainable supplier relations can be achieved.

While previous entrepreneurship research has only seldom drawn on organizational ambidexterity, the analysis of the important contemporary tensions among entrepreneurship, innovation management and strategic management issues may be facilitated by more closely analysing organizational ambidexterity in entrepreneurial settings. In this paper, we follow this thinking and more closely analyse an often applied form of corporate entrepreneurship: automation. Such automation is transferring work that was formerly conducted by humans to machines and may thus result in new tensions between corporate entrepreneurship, innovation management and the management of organizational stakeholders such as employees. The present paper investigates whether increased automation lowers the stability of firms’ relationships with their employees. In addition, we expect that this relationship is moderated by organizational ambidexterity, as employees may have perceived ambidexterity as a signal that their firm will not overly invest in exploitation only, but maintain a balance between exploitation and exploration. Drawing on stakeholder theory, previous insights into corporate entrepreneurship and a survey of German Mittelstand firms, our findings show that highly ambidextrous firms are indeed more vulnerable to automation, leading to lower employee relational stability. Our findings thus suggest that in highly ambidextrous firms, novel tensions around automation-related corporate entrepreneurship will be detrimental to the stability of the firm’s relations with one of its key stakeholder groups: employees.

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