IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/maorev/v18y2022i2p358-394_8.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Far-Reaching Parental Love? Co-Governance of Intergenerational Succession and Innovation Activities in Chinese Family Firms

Author

Listed:
  • Zhu, Zhenduo
  • Kang, Yuanfei

Abstract

Motivated by the research gap on intergenerational succession dynamics of family firms, this study examines the effects of initiating intergenerational succession on firms' innovation activities. We propose that initiation of intra-family succession can result in founder–successor co-governance that represents a strategic transition to the succession and incorporates the two conflicting yet complementary directions of change and continuity. Grounded in the theory of altruism, we suggest that co-governance will positively affect firms' innovation activities and that this positive link is contingent on the idiosyncratic intra-family relationships of kinship type, age difference, and gender difference between the founder and the successor. Furthermore, we posit that co-governance will lead to a flow of resources to low risk, rather than more inventive but higher risk, innovations. Based on the unbalanced panel data of 4,694 firm-year observations in our sample from listed Chinese family firms during the 2006–2015 period, empirical analysis supports our hypotheses and confirms that when examining family firms' innovation, there is a need to take the heterogeneity of the intra-family governance structure more fully into consideration. 针对家族企业代际传承动态性研究的不足,本研究探讨了家族企业代际传承对其创新活动的影响。我们认为,家族内部传承的启动会导致创始人和继任者的跨代共治,这种共治方式代表了传承的战略过渡,使企业既保持连续性又有变化性。基于利他主义理论,我们认为跨代共治会对企业的创新活动产生积极的影响,但其影响程度取决于创始者和继任者之间特殊的亲属关系、年龄差异和性别差异。此外,我们假设跨代共治将导致资源流向低风险的创新,而不是更具创造性但风险更高的创新。我们对2006-2015年中国4694个上市家族企业年度的非均衡面板数据进行了分析,结果支持了我们的假设,并证实了在研究家族企业创新时,有必要更充分地考虑到家庭内部治理结构的异质性。

Suggested Citation

  • Zhu, Zhenduo & Kang, Yuanfei, 2022. "A Far-Reaching Parental Love? Co-Governance of Intergenerational Succession and Innovation Activities in Chinese Family Firms," Management and Organization Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 18(2), pages 358-394, April.
  • Handle: RePEc:cup:maorev:v:18:y:2022:i:2:p:358-394_8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1740877621000450/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Wang, Kun & Huang, Min & Zhang, Le & Wang, Kun & Dong, Qiang, 2024. "Green innovation in family business succession: Exploring decision-making under parent-child co-governance," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 67(PA).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:maorev:v:18:y:2022:i:2:p:358-394_8. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/mor .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.