Entrepreneurial by design : How organizational design affects family and nonfamily firms’ opportunity exploitation

De Massis, Alfredo and Eddleston, Kimberly A. and Rovelli, Paola (2021) Entrepreneurial by design : How organizational design affects family and nonfamily firms’ opportunity exploitation. Journal of Management Studies, 58 (1). pp. 27-62. ISSN 0022-2380

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Abstract

Opportunity exploitation is a key aspect of the corporate entrepreneurship process and is particularly important to maintain a family firm through multiple generations. Drawing on an organizational design perspective, we investigate opportunity exploitation in family versus nonfamily firms. The empirical analyses on survey data from a sample of 224 Italian firms reveal that family firms exploit significantly fewer opportunities than nonfamily firms, and this result is fully mediated by the organization of their TMT. Our findings show that how family firms organize is crucial for opportunity exploitation, thus extending and enriching prior corporate entrepreneurship research, highlighting the importance of bringing an organizational design perspective to corporate entrepreneurship and family business studies.