Entrepreneurial orientation and innovation in family SMEs: Unveiling the (actual) impact of the Board of Directors

By Unai Arzubiaga, J. Kotlar, Alfredo De Massis, Amaia Maseda, Txomin Iturralde. Journal of Business Venturing, 2018

274 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Drawing on stewardship and resource dependence theories, we examine how the board of directors (BoD) influences the link between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and ambidextrous innovation in small and medium sized family firms (family SMEs). Our analysis of 230 Spanish family SMEs shows that family involvement in the BoD has a negative effect on their ability to turn EO into innovation. Moreover, we show that the BoD's strategic involvement in service and control tasks and the provision of knowledge and skills have positive effects, whereas the intensity of BoD activity has a surprisingly negative effect. These findings underscore that the effects of the BoD on the entrepreneurship-innovation link are more complex than previously thought, pointing to the important role of both BoD composition and BoD functioning for enabling innovation in family SMEs.

Subfields: Accounting, Management of Technology and Innovation, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7aaeba47d76866fa7890a014a12d12e476732967

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Citations in the corpus

Impact of Entrepreneurial Orientation on Innovation Capability: The Mediating Role of Absorptive Capability and Organizational Learning Capabilities (2021, background): “Most past studies [15,19,25,26] introduced several models, and theories to predict innovation performance and its associated outcomes were ignoring other factors like learning orientation or adopted knowledge.”
Family Firm Heterogeneity: A Definition, Common Themes, Scholarly Progress, and Directions Forward (2021, background): “For instance, more kin on the board restricts the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and innovation as shown by Arzubiaga et al. (2018). In general, a mix of family and outside directors is considered ideal given that family involvement in the board has both positive and negative effec”