James G. Combs

• Chair at University of Central Florida

Different social exchange relationships among family members and between family and non-family stakeholders influence individual, group, and family-firm outcomes. Although many studies provide insights into social exchange relationships in family businesses, these studies are scattered across multiple literatures. Using the lens of social exchange...

The Lean Startup movement fundamentally changed entrepreneurial education and the way new ventures evolve. While Steve Blank and other founders of the movement embraced academic ideas, the movement grew among practitioners largely disconnected from academic entrepreneurship research. The purposes of this special issue are (1) to better connect Lean...

Research describes pivots as quick and comprehensive change in venture direction triggered by (external) opportunity-based information suggesting a better opportunity. We discovered two distinct pivot types in a qualitative study (Study 1), neither of which fully aligns with prior research. “Opportunity pivots” are triggered by opportunity-based in...

Researchers are divided on whether shareholder agreements (SAs) improve or hurt firm value. We offer family firms as a context where SAs add value and explain why; SAs limit “superprincipal” agency conflicts between family owners and other family members. A panel of French firms and a second study of French Initial Public Offerings show shareholder...

The transgenerational entrepreneurship perspective suggests senior-generation leaders with transgenerational control intentions (TCI) innovate to position the next generation for success, but many family firms fail to do so. We introduce transgenerational control uncertainty (TCU) as a theoretical mechanism explaining when TCI enhances innovation b...

Family owners monitor managers, attenuating principal–agent conflicts and improving firm performance. However, family owners also appropriate resources, creating principal–principal conflicts that harm firm performance. Although these effects occur simultaneously, research does not explain when one outweighs the other. We theorize that agency costs...

Transferring leadership across generations is a defining characteristic of family businesses. Yet many successors underperform, and little is known about why. We extend parental control theory to develop a model of parenting effects in family businesses. Primary dyadic data from successors and subordinates in 119 family businesses, supplemented wit...

This special issue on “Advancing Entrepreneurship Research through Meta-analysis” was commissioned in the belief that many entrepreneurship research topics have reached a crossroads. As a maturing, dynamic, and growing field, researchers are generating ever more empirical evidence regarding the field's central questions. Researchers can continue do...

This brief coda to the special issue contains heartfelt thoughts on the late Mike Wright offered by several of his friends and colleagues.

Entrepreneurship declines precipitously across generations in family firms, except in families that convey an entrepreneurial legacy to successors. However, because an entrepreneurial legacy is imprinted on all children, its impact should extend beyond successors. Inductive analysis of data from 26 nonsuccessor adult children from 13 multigeneratio...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce strategy as a factor that explains when franchisors – through the franchisees they select – seek to replicate routines exactly versus allow local adaptation of routines. Design/methodology/approach Combined archival and survey data from 248 US and Canadian franchisors actively seeking franchisees w...

Researchers recently pointed to family science as one avenue for better understanding business families. We submit, however, that leveraging family science will require building on what researchers have already learned, often without the benefit of family science theories. Thus, we review progress from studies that investigate links between busines...

Family-managed firms take actions to protect their reputations. We theorize that one such action involves avoiding corporate political activity (CPA) that expose firms to social attack, especially when also invested in corporate social responsibility. Because large firms are frequent targets for social attack, the same sensitivity that encourages m...

Research Summary Boards of directors make high‐stake decisions that involve hiring, compensating, and dismissing CEOs. Building on theory about choice‐supportive bias and escalation of commitment, we theorize that “hiring directors” (directors who were present during a CEO's hiring) will display choice‐supportive bias and escalate commitment to poo...

Alliance portfolio diversity (APD) helps firms access diverse capabilities and knowledge. APD can also increase transaction costs, but it is unknown whether and how transaction cost theory's (TCT's) insights about hierarchical integration operate at the portfolio level. We adapt TCT to the portfolio level to suggest that the transaction costs from...

Research Summary Imprinting theory predicts that organizations are imprinted with multiple intersecting imprints that persist. Evidence suggests, however, that imprints are sometimes reprioritized or modified, implying that they can be strategically managed. We draw upon rhetorical history research and an in‐depth historical case study of New Zeala...

Early meta‐analyses in management research sought primarily to resolve seemingly conflicting findings by estimating a relationship's population‐level effect size. Since then, management researchers have adopted increasingly sophisticated approaches that permit new theorizing, testing and comparing sophisticated models, and identifying boundary cond...

Social entrepreneurs increasingly use franchising to scale social value. Tracey and Jarvis described how social franchising is like commercially-oriented franchising, but noted critical challenges arising from dual goals. We investigate a social franchisor that overcame these challenges and describe how the social mission became the source of busin...

Purpose Theory predicts that balancing exploratory and exploitative learning (i.e., ambidexterity) across alliance portfolio domains (e.g. value chain function, governance modes) increases firm performance, whereas balance within domains decreases performance. Prior empirical work, however, only assessed balance/imbalance within and across two dom...

Work-family boundary research debates whether family demands should be integrated or separated from work demands. Our thesis is that the impact of boundary management preferences on business performance depends on the entrepreneur's gender. We also investigate how family-to-business support and business location alter the gender and boundary manage...

Transgenerational control intention (TCI) is a pivotal characteristic of many family firms. Yet, it remains unclear whether TCI benefits family-firm performance by instilling a long-term view, or hurts performance by fueling harmful socioemotional wealth (SEW) goals. We posit that it depends who pursues it. When faced with TCI, family managers are...

Family business researchers have felt increasing distress with the lack of understanding about how families – i.e., their structure, relationships, emotions, and goals – shape how families manage family firms, leading to calls to more fully incorporate “family science” theories about the nature of family into research about family firms. It seems l...

Research summary: Corporate scandals of the previous decade have heightened attention on board independence. Indeed, boards at many large firms are now so independent that the CEO is “home alone” as the lone inside member. We build upon “pro‐insider” research within agency theory to explain how the growing trend toward lone‐insider boards affects k...

While families have a large and undeniable impact on human behavior, management research is yet to fully embrace how aspects of families (e.g., family-member relationships, family structures, and family events) influence entrepreneurs, employees, managers, and their organizations. There is a large body of research known as family science that draws...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-keep-a-family-business-alive-for-generations-1448045760

lthough large owners monitor managers effectively, they differ in important ways. Whereas founder owners focus on firm performance, family owners also pursue socioemotional goals. We leverage this distinction to theorize that family owners offer hired CEOs more incentive pay—to attract nonfamily CEOs, signal good governance, and achieve better firm...

Trust is an important factor for managing transaction costs within inter-organizational relationships (IORs). Research on trust indicates that separate dimensions of trust arise from a partner’s competence (i.e., technical skills, experience, and reliability) and integrity (i.e., motives, honesty, and character), and these dimensions have potential...

Emerging evidence suggests that pay dispersion among non-CEO top management team (TMT) members harms firm performance, which raises questions about why firms’ owners tolerate or even support it. Prior research shows that the key distinction between founder and family owners is that in addition to firm performance and growth goals, family owners pur...

Research shows that family firms are less entrepreneurial, on average, especially after the founder departs. There are notable exceptions, however, and so we build a new theory to explain how these exceptional firms accomplish transgenerational entrepreneurship. Specifically, we conducted in-depth interviews with owners and (potential) successors i...

Agency theory is the dominant explanation for entrepreneurs' decisions about how much to grow through franchising vis-à-vis company ownership. We introduce a resource-based explanation and submit that the proportion franchised is influenced by efforts to organize franchisor-owned and relational strategic assets so that their value can be best lever...

By explaining processes through which familiness affects innovation, Carnes and Ireland take an important step toward explaining prior mixed findings. Their research also underscores the heterogeneity of families in that different family firms have different innovative outcomes. We adapt the circumplex model from family science research to help exp...

The factors that influence franchisors' propensity tofranchise are investigated. Although most studies rely on either resourcescarcity or agency theory to generate hypotheses, the hypotheses in this studyare grounded in both perspectives. The first three hypotheses predict thatyounger, smaller franchisors with a multinational scope are likely to ma...

Recent family business research has focused on transgenerational intent (TI)—the plan to pass management of the business to future generations—as a defining characteristic of family firms. We theorize that TI is influenced by the current leader's consideration of factors related to three subsystems (business, ownership, and family) that underlie th...

Creating organizational designs that maximize performance is a key goal for many executives. We sought to uncover ways that a giant organization – the United States Department of Defense (DoD) – could improve its performance via organazational design changes. Based on input from 80 executives who collectively represent over 60 defense contractors,...

Creating organizational designs that maximize performance is a key goal for many executives. We sought to uncover ways that a giant organization – the United States Department of Defense (DoD) – could improve its performance via organazational design changes. Based on input from 80 executives who collectively represent over 60 defense contractors,...

Boards have become increasingly independent, to the point where some firms have removed all of the insiders except for the CEO. The authors call this phenomenon a "lone-insider board" and submit that it constitutes a fundamentally distinct governance arrangement worthy of inquiry. This paper describes institutional pressures that give rise to incre...

Plural forms exist when managers use two owners to perform one activity. Franchising is a plural form explained by agency theory, however, the theory is unable to explain two franchisor actions: 1) allowing franchisees to own multiple outlets and 2) co-locating company-owned and franchised outlets. We use research that describes a symbiosis between...

Transaction cost economics has long been a key perspective on the organization of economic activity. Over the past three decades, numerous studies have examined transaction cost economics' assertion that the costs surrounding exchanges, called transaction costs, direct managers' decisions about whether to organize activities via market, hybrid, or...

Recent advances in resource‐based theory suggest that the ways managers use strategic actions to leverage resources has important influences on firms' resulting competitive advantages. However, theory dealing with the nature of leveraging remains underdeveloped. We develop the notion that strategic actions that successfully leverage one resource mi...

For decades, most franchising research leveraged one of three theoretical milestones - resource scarcity, agency theory, and plural form symbiosis - to answer questions about why, where, and how often firms use franchising. Today's franchising researchers are leveraging new theories, investigating under-examined aspects of franchising, and explorin...

We report the results of a survey of key thought leaders within the entrepreneurship field centered on the relationship between franchising and entrepreneurship. Specifically, we asked members of the Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice editorial board whether they consider franchisors to be entrepreneurs, whether they consider franchisees to be en...

Theory at both the micro and macro level predicts that investments in superior human capital generate better firm-level performance. However, human capital takes time and money to develop or acquire, which potentially offsets its positive benefits. Indeed, extant tests appear equivocal regarding its impact. To clarify what is known, we meta-analyze...

Franchising is a popular and multifaceted business arrangement that has attracted considerable research attention. Past inquiry has focused on franchising’s antecedents, consequences, and factors that moderate these relationships. The authors review recent progress within franchising research and identify gaps in the literature. They also describe...

Understanding the conclusions a body of evidence offers involves accumulating findings. Two recent articles used vote counting to assess the evidence related to important macro theories: transaction cost theory and resource-based theory. Each concluded that its focal theory is not well supported. In contrast, recent meta‐analyses of the same theori...

Understanding the nature of family representation in public firms has been an important topic for entrepreneurship research. Because CEO compensation is a key tool that boards use to align the interests of shareholders and managers, researchers have taken steps toward understanding how family representation affects CEO compensation. Prior research...

Entrepreneurship is a relatively young field; nonetheless, the research in this domain has been growing at an impressive rate in recent decades. As is commonly the case with emerging fields, entrepreneurship research currently faces a number of opportunities and challenges. Overall, entrepreneurship has an opportunity to establish itself as a field...

A key decision for entrepreneurs in many retail and service firms is whether, and how much, to use franchising. If the decision is made to franchise, the actor may assume one of two "identities" or tactics: (1) the "chain builder," who uses a blend of company and franchised outlets, and (2) the "turnkey," who sells business opportunities but does n...

Current explanations for franchising assume that managers only pay attention to firm-specific economic factors. In contrast, the authors submit that social factors described by institutional theory will enhance understanding. Using a sample of 1,300 franchisors active during 1980 through 2000, the authors find evidence that both environmental and i...

We incorporate resource-based theory with agency theory to offer a more complete explanation for firms' franchising decisions and performance. We test our ideas using a survey of 164 franchisors and find that relational strategic assets help explain the propensity to franchise. Both organizational and relational strategic assets also impact perform...

New ventures lack resources, are buffeted by environmental factors, and often experience rapid growth and organizational transformations that can have profound effects on performance and survival. Methodologically, however, efforts to explain variation in entrepreneurial outcomes among and between levels over time often address levels or time, but...

As the global economy becomes more service-based, the need to understand how service firms govern different activities has become increasingly important. Transaction Cost Theory (TCT) has long been a key perspective on the integration of different activities. TCT asserts that the costs surrounding exchanges, called transaction costs, direct manager...

Resource-based theory (RBT) has emerged as a key perspective guiding inquiry into the determinants of organizational performance. Since the early 1990s, numerous studies have examined RBT's assertion that the extent to which organizations possess strategic resources is positively related to performance. Although many studies appear to support this...

In private family firms, affiliate directors are largely resource-providing servants of the family. In nonfamily public firms with dispersed ownership, affiliates are, figuratively speaking, symbiotic parasites loyally supporting their professional management hosts while extracting revenues for their home firms. The public family firm stands somewh...

The causes of failure are central to entrepreneurship research. This study extends agency and resource-based logic to explain how established franchisors affect franchisee failure. Analysis of 88 restaurant chains shows that franchisors reduce franchisee failure through contract design and by building strategic resources. Thus, franchisors' resourc...

abstract Prior studies of the relationship between the composition of boards of directors and firm performance offer equivocal results. Drawing on agency and power circulation theories, we attempt to reduce this equivocality by asserting that CEO power moderates the relationship. Specifically, an outside director dominated board is needed to check...

Research suggests that collaborative supply chain management (SCM) helps chain members create “a rising tide that lifts all boats.” Yet resource dependence theory suggests that when tides rise, some boats are lifted more than others; members who furnish important resources or resources where control is concentrated have bargaining power. Drawing on...

All executives would like to see their organizations perform better, and most search for tools that can help make this happen. For decades, human resource managers have believed that their function enhances performance. This contention has been met with skepticism on the part of executives, who wonder whether funds allocated to the human resource f...

Although there is growing evidence that high performance work practices (HPWPs) affect organizational performance, varying sample characteristics, research designs, practices examined, and organizational performance measures used has led extant findings to vary dramatically, making the size of the overall effect difficult to estimate. We use meta-a...

The article discusses a study which examined the response of board of directors to shareholder concerns about CEO stock options. The authors studied how shareholders react differently to the announcement of stock option plans and whether negative shareholder votes translate into subsequent action by boards of directors. Their findings suggest that...

A study of ninety-four food-service chains revealed four distinct groups relating to strategic use or avoidance of franchising. The four groups are as follows: manager-scarce franchisors, money-scarce franchisors, franchising minimizers, and seasoned veterans. The use of franchising by the manager-scarce and money-scarce franchisors supports the co...

Alternative explanations of franchising offer contrasting predictions as to how the proportion of franchised outlets changes as franchisors age. We propose that two dominant views—resource-scarcity and agency theory—can be integrated by delineating when each is most relevant. Data from 102 franchisors over a 21-year period suggest that resource-sca...

Organizational performance is widely recognized as an important – if not the most important – construct in strategic management research. Researchers also agree that organizational performance is a multidimensional construct. However, the research implications of the construct's multidimensionality are less understood. In this chapter, we use a syn...

Although franchising is a pervasive organizational form, little is known about its performance consequences. Prior studies have not found a direct performance effect, suggesting a need for alternative approaches. Drawing upon agency and resource scarcity theories, we develop the idea that strategic groups exist among franchisors and that performanc...

As franchising has increased its visibility and impact on the business landscape, it has attracted the attention of a wide variety of researchers from different academic backgrounds. We draw together much of this research by juxtaposing the two key theories used to explain franchising, resource scarcity and agency theory, with the empirical finding...

Alternative explanations of franchising offer contrasting predictions as to how the proportion of franchised outlets changes as franchisors age. We propose that two dominant views—resource-scarcity and agency theory—can be integrated by delineating when each is most relevant. Data from 102 franchisors over a 21-year period suggest that resource-sca...

Although uncovering the factors that lead firms to offer franchises has long been a central goal of franchising research, considerable ambiguity surrounds extant findings. In an effort to help resolve this ambiguity, we used meta-analysis to aggregate results from 44 studies containing 140 tests of ten hypotheses. The ten hypotheses reflect two the...

Managerialism is a theory that suggests that managers extract pay premiums by gaining control over their firms' compensation processes. Human capital theory suggests instead that pay premiums reflect executives' superior managerial abilities. This study tests a contingency perspective in which the source of pay premiums depends on executives' power...

The decision to expand via franchising rather than by opening company-owned units stems from a desire to keep outlet-monitoring costs low, combined with inexpensive access to capital.

The article discusses factors which influence a company's decision of choosing which managers to keep following an acquisition. Research has shown that the odds of a company surviving a merger improve if the acquiring firm can retain the acquired firm's high ranking executives, such as their president or chief executive officer. Statistics have sho...

Interfirm cooperation and its performance implications are examined in the context of two widely cited theoretical approaches to organizations. Broadly speaking, the resource-based view suggests that firms seek to capitalize on and increase their capabilities and endowments, whereas organizational economics asserts that firms focus on minimizing th...

Interfirm cooperation and its performance implications are examined in the context of two widely cited theoretical approaches to organizations. Broadly speaking, the resource-based view suggests that firms seek to capitalize on and increase their capabilities and endowments, whereas organizational economics asserts that firms focus on minimizing th...

We offer a rationale for a link between capital scarcity and franchising. Predictions respectively based on agency theory and the capital scarcity hypothesis were tested among 91 restaurant chains. Our specific focus was on whether or not variables based on capital scarcity could explain variance in firms' franchising decisions beyond what was expl...

Cooperative organizational forms such as franchising and joint venturing have long been popularamong hospitality chains. However, not all chains use cooperative organizational forms and those that do varygreatlyin theirproclivityto use them. One possible explanation for this variation is that when a chain confronts critical resourcescarcities, its...

The link between organizational configurations and performance has become a central and somewhat controversial focus of research in the strategic management literature. We statistically aggregated results from 40 original tests of the configurations-performance relationship. In contrast to previous qualitative reviews, this meta-analysis demonstrat...

In 1790, Samuel Slater began operating America's first factory using a business format that became known as the Rhode Island system. Twenty-four years later, Francis Cabot Lowell created a new breed of integrated factory, the Waltham system. This paper examines how these systems developed distinctly different strategic profiles. Findings suggest th...

In a recent article, Carney and Gedajlovic (1991) broke ground by identifying five types of franchisors. The present study attempted to confirm Carney and Gedajlovic's findings on an independent sample and to determine whether types identified differed enough to warrant sample heterogeneity concerns in research not accounting for them. The findings...