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Entrepreneurs have been traditionally epitomized as rugged individuals garnering creative forces of innovation and technology. Applying this traditional, limited, and narrow view of entrepreneurship to ethnic firm creation and growth is to ignore or discount core cultural values of the ethnic contexts in which these firms operate. It is no longer possible to depend solely on human capital theory and household characteristic descriptions to understand the complex and interdependent relationships between the ethnic-owning family, its firm, and the community context in which the firm operates. This paper addresses the complex dynamic of ethnic firms with three purposes: (a) to provide a cultural context for the three ethnic groups composing the National Minority Business Owner Study; (b) to extend the Sustainable Family Business Theory, a dynamic, behaviorally-based, multi-dimensional family firm theory, by clarifying how it accommodates ethnic firm complexities within their cultural context, and (c) to derive implications for research, education and consulting with worldwide applications.

The purpose of the study was to investigate power structures and interactions among father‐daughter and father‐son family business decision teams experiencing management transfer. Analytic induction was the methodology used to test the family FIRO theory. Support was found for the theoretical premise of sequential and developmental relationships among the three dimensions (inclusion, control, and integration). The women in the father‐son business experienced feelings of exclusion, incidents of higher conflict among family members, which produced less shared meaning, and lower levels of integration among family members. On the other hand, women in the father‐daughter business experienced feelings of inclusion, resulting in lower conflict that created high levels of shared meaning, collaboration, and integration among family members. In management transfer consultations, if the entire family business decision team is not included in information gathering, and if the decision team is not observed interacting as a group, with individuals being allowed to confidentially confirm or refute the group interaction data, biased information may be obtained. For more successful adaptations in management transfers, power structures and interactions need to be reconstructed; failure to do so leads to confusion and conflict, resulting in distrust and lack of fellowship within the management decision team.

This paper is based on a study of 391 family‐business‐owning couples where the husband is the business owner. The purpose of the study was to examine the work involvement of the wife in the business, the business tensions, and the impact of those tensions on family business success. Fifty‐seven percent of wives worked in thebusiness, 47% of whom were paid. Forty‐two percent of wives were considered major decision makers. Having more than one decision maker in the business impacted certain types of inclusion tension. Business and family success outcomes varied by level of tensions. There was initial evidence of a threshold where business tensions begin to affect business success negatively.