Do family businesses “pay it forward”? seeking to understand the relationship between intergenerational behaviour and environmentally sustainable business practices

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Date
2014-07-22
Authors
Funk, Jeremy
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Abstract
Family business research has explored a number of important questions related to the complexity of intra-organizational family-based involvement (Sharma, 2004; Sharma, Hoy, Astrachen & Koiranen, 2007; Debicki, Matherne III, Kellermanns & Chrisman, 2009; Litz, Pearson & Litchfield, 2011), but the possibility of a potential link between the intentions and actions to facilitate or pursue the voluntary sacrifice by the current generation for generations still to come has largely gone unexplored. I seek to further explore how one’s intention and action, or succession strategy, to eventually pass an enterprise on to the next generation of family potentially influences how one manages that enterprise in the present. I conducted the research using a cross-sectional survey of 218 Manitoba family farms in 2011 to 2012. The data was collected in both an on-line and paper format. I have tested my hypotheses in the Manitoba family farm community to confirm a positive relationship between family farm succession strategy and environmental behaviour while controlling for industry specific measures. The proposed moderators of industry context (resource munificence) and familial context (intergenerational affinity) were not significant. The results provide further support to the notion that within the family business context, succession strategy and environmental behaviours are connected to intergenerational beneficence as “the extent to which members of the present generations are willing to sacrifice their own self-interest for the benefit of future others in the absence of economic or material incentives to present actors for doing so” (Wade-Benzoni & Tost, 2009:166).
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Family Business, Succession, Environmental Sustainability, Intergenerational Behaviour
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