Strategic Determinants of Family Firm Performance: A Proposed Research Framework

Studies on family firm have increased rapidly in recent years, as a result of importance of family businesses increased for the global economy. However, still little research is looking at the strategic management of family firms. In particular comprehensively, the strategic alignment with external environment, structure and family involvement influence on firm performance has been largely neglected thus far. The dynamic environment through the world economic crisis proposed the need for more concentration on the strategic alignment between a firm’s contingencies, organizational characteristics, results in supreme performance. However, it is has extremely argued that family firms differ in expressions of their strategic orientation, at most as a result of the family influence on the firm compared to non-family. This proposed study addresses the question how strategic orientation contributes to developing performance in family firms and what role can external environment and family influence play. Depending on the distinguished typology proposed to strategy, we considering strategic perspectives of family and environment influence on the firm. Building on a sample of 380 Palestinian family firms, we hypothesized that that strategy aligned with organizational structure, moderated by family and environment influence play an important role for the achievement of top most performance.