Research summary This conceptual article discusses when and why family firms are motivated to engage in entrepreneurial activities. Drawing on family development theory, we offer midrange reasoning about the impact of enterprising family dynamics—such as the birth of a child or children leaving home—on the motivation for corporate venturing and its changes over time. Moreover, our model also accounts for the contingent effect of ownership and business developmental dimensions. Finally, we predict that motivation for corporate venturing can, in turn, spur the development of the enterprising family. Managerial summary Overcoming the idea that family firms are either very or minimally entrepreneurial, we focus on the enterprising family and consider its development to explain the motivation toward corporate venturing. We look at the evolution of the roles and norms of family members over time and predict that motivation for venturing increases with family growth until the moment in which a succession takes place and the younger generation receives the baton. We also consider how changes in the ownership structure and business growth influence the relationship between family development and motivation for venturing. The latter, in turn, can trigger the development of the enterprising family itself, with its structure and norms. Our work, in sum, depicts the enterprising family as a springboard for repeated acts of entrepreneurship across generations. Copyright © 2016 Strategic Management Society.

This conceptual work depicts internal corporate venturing in family business as consisting of two separate and sequential strategic choices: first, the decision about the degree of relatedness between the parent firm and the venture; second, the definition of the level of venture autonomy. Drawing on stewardship theory, we argue that family business dynamics, and in particular the development of the ownership structure, influence how family firms pursue internal corporate venturing and make decisions related to such two steps. We also discuss the contingent effect of corporate governance characteristics and of the national legal system.

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Growth brings lifeblood to sustain longevity across generation, but also critical challenges for family business. Relying on the behavioral agency model and its assumptions on risk-bearing in family firms, we discuss and test the effect of family involvement in the top management team (TMT) on family business growth. We use an inputbehavior-outcome framework based on the mediating role of entrepreneurial orientation. We also consider the moderating role of different ownership structures on the relationship between family involvement in the TMT on entrepreneurial orientation (EO). Results based on survey data collected by the STEP research consortium support the hypothesized negative effect of family involvement in the TMT on growth, fully mediated by EO. We also find that the presence of passive family members as majority shareholders and multigenerational involvement in ownership are important contingencies of the direct effect. Our evidence points to the fact that risk-bearing in family firms is not just dependent on the degree of family involvement in management, but also on the interests of different types of shareholders. We show that the at-times stylized negative traits of family firms are not universally valid, and that a comprehensive view of family influence over the business is needed to ascertain whether and to what extent these firms actually achieve growth.