Female entrepreneurship to date represents a key component of the business\ud
sector worldwide as, in 2012 more than 187 million out of 400 million\ud
entrepreneurs were women (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2013). In academia\ud
the gender factor in entrepreneurship emerged in the late 1970s Schwartz (Journal\ud
of Contemporary Business, 5(1), 47–76, 1976) and especially since the beginning of\ud
the new millennium a substantial growth in the investigation of this topic has been\ud
registered. Thus, the time has come to systematize the academic progress on this issue\ud
and to reflect on future research directions in order to gain deeper insights into the\ud
female entrepreneurship domain. In this vein, our paper aims to enrich the conversation\ud
on female entrepreneurship by reviewing 248 papers published in the last\ud
14 years. In doing so, we identify and analyze the new insights that have emerged\ud
in the literature from both a managerial and a sociological perspective, thus\ud
responding to the numerous calls for a more interdisciplinary approach to the study\ud
of this topic
performance by contextualising the study within Italy and empirically analysing 307 Italian womenowned\ud
firms.\ud
Design/methodology/approach – By using ordinal regressions, this paper empirically investigates\ud
the influence of three dimensions of the family context on female firms’ performance, namely: the\ud
motivations to start a business; the support from the family once the business is established; and the\ud
mechanisms to achieve a suitable balance between work and family life.\ud
Findings – Overall, the results offer substantial support for the assumption that female business\ud
owners benefit from being pulled into the endeavour, from specific linkages with family and also from\ud
selected mechanisms to balance work and family life, thus contributing to show how strong the\ud
relationship between a firm’s performance and the family context is for women.\ud
Originality/value – Today female entrepreneurship represents an important economic driver\ud
worldwide, leading scholars to strongly advocate the need to shift the female entrepreneurship\ud
research focus from the analysis of women business owners’ characteristics to the investigation of\ud
those specific factors able to directly affect female firms’ activities. In this vein, this paper aims at\ud
pushing further into the still less studied domain of work/family intertwinement as, surprisingly,\ud
the impact that family-related factors exert on women-owned businesses’ performance is still\ud
under-researched
Past research has increasingly suggested that CEO/TMT personality can
play a relevant role in influencing various external (e.g. firm performance) and internal (e.g. firm organizational structure) management outcomes. These promising results need appropriate systematization and discussion, which we aim at providing through a literature review based on rigorous inclusion/exclusion criteria. Our analysis shows great heterogeneity in regard to both the personality traits and the personality based management outcomes explored by the investigated population of studies. Thus, we specifically use the framework provided by the Five-Factor Model
(FFM) of personality to codify the publications and this framework allows us to identify some possible theoretical trajectories. These trajectories mainly regard the empirical testing of the highlighted associations between CEO emotional stability, extraversion and conscientiousness with bureaucratization, strategic pro-activity and firm performance. Our article is primarily intended for those scholars and practitioners who want to improve their knowledge about psychology-based decision making and behavioural corporate governance through the understanding of how CEO/TMT personality can affect their strategic decisions
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