Abstract
In recent years, non-family managers (NFMs) in family firms have received increased scholarly attention, and numerous papers related to this topic have been published. Since the last academic review of NFMs in family firms (Klein and Bell in Electron J Family Bus Stud 1(1):19–37, 2007) was published a decade ago, an increasing number of relevant papers have been published. However, an integrative understanding of NFMs in family firms is still missing. An updated review in this area is useful for assessing the current state of the literature and for proposing fruitful directions for further research. For these reasons, this paper systematically reviews 118 papers relevant to the study of NFMs in family firms. The findings from the sample are organized, synthesized and analyzed with the help of an integrative framework we developed based on Gersick et al.’s (Generation to generation: life cycles of the family business. Harvard Business Press, Boston, 1997) three-circle model separated into nine different clusters. In addition, we identify a broad array of important future research avenues.
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Notes
The fact that Klein and Bell (2007) included only eight papers that are also part of our review sample is because when Klein and Bell (2007) reviewed the literature (1) scholarly literature on non-family managers in family firms was much more limited than today and (2) Klein and Bell (2007) also included a significant amount of practitioner literature in their analyses. As is typical in systematic literature reviews (e.g., McKelvey and Lassen 2013), we opted to exclude the practitioner literature because the findings reported in such literature cannot be expected to be as rigorously assessed prior to publication as findings reported in peer-reviewed, academic journals.
Of course, an alternative explanation for not having identified any findings in this cluster is that potentially relevant papers were excluded from our sample because they did not pass our quality threshold. However, even if such papers did exist, given they did not pass the quality threshold, their findings may not have been as rigidly developed as those included in our sample, thus warranting their exclusion.
References
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Acknowledgements
This paper is part of the second author’s doctoral dissertation. Previous versions of the paper were presented at the 2016 edition of FiFu Dachli conference, the 2017 edition of the International Family Enterprise Research Academy (IFERA) 2017 annual conference and the 2017 edition of the Interdisciplinary European Conference on Entrepreneurship Research (IECER). In addition, the paper was presented in research seminars at Johannes Kepler University Linz and the University of Siegen. We would like to thank the participants of all these events and two anonymous reviewers for highly valuable comments and suggestions that have helped us in improving earlier versions of this paper.
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Hiebl, M.R., Li, Z. Non-family managers in family firms: review, integrative framework and future research agenda. Rev Manag Sci 14, 763–807 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11846-018-0308-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11846-018-0308-x