Kimberly A. Eddleston

Northeastern University | NEU · D'Amore-McKim School of Business

When the CEO-owner of an SME suddenly dies, who should take over? Integrating the social embeddedness perspective with research on crisis management, we theorize that an SME’s financial health gets progressively worse before it stabilizes and recovers, reflecting an inverse U-shaped relationship between time since the CEO-owner’s sudden death and a...

We welcome work on lifestyle entrepreneurship - defined as "the creation of new ventures to engage in activities that the entrepreneurs find rewarding and/or to allow them to live in desired locations” (Ivanycheva, Schulze, Lundmark and Chirico, 2024: 2257, JMS) - that reflects its tradition and academic foundations and that draws from research in...

Plain English Summary Family and Nonfamily Firm Managers View Investment Information Differently. It is not clear why. We show that family firm managers were less sensitive to volatility leading to more patient investments. #ManagerialChoices #Investments #FamilyFirms. To better understand why the investments of family and nonfamily firms tend to d...

Family business research across academic disciplines has increasingly considered the causes of “bad behavior” in family firms and its impact. A review of this literature is important because different emphases in different disciplines may obscure the nature of dysfunctional behaviors in family firms. After reviewing 160 studies from 64 journals, we...

Research Summary We integrate social learning theory with gender role congruity theory to propose that family firms gain more from female leadership than nonfamily firms due to the congruence of female communal values with those of a family business. Results of our empirical study, based on a sample of 322 Spanish small‐ and medium‐sized enterprise...

Building on the mixed gamble perspective, we examine family versus nonfamily firms’ propensity to increase or decrease their internationalization in response to different sources of risk. Our framework explains how a firm’s mixed gamble calculus of internationalization can change as it adjusts to business, industry, and institutional circumstances....

Integrating the family embeddedness perspective with research on commensality and family meals, we develop a framework that explains why some families are more likely to fuel entrepreneurship than others. Inspired by the diversity literature and the role of the Chinese Confucian culture in shaping family dynamics, we explore how two demographic (i....

Integrating the family embeddedness perspective with research on commensality and family meals, we develop a framework that explains why some families are more likely to fuel entrepreneurship than others. Inspired by the diversity literature and the role of the Chinese Confucian culture in shaping family dynamics, we explore how two demographic (i....

According to family business theory and practice, family firms often face a paradoxical tension between their anchorage to the past and the need to renew and innovate to remain competitive, which often hampers innovation. Given that innovation is inherently a social process that depends on the knowledge and creativity of an organization’s people, e...

Entrepreneurship and innovation are social and relational processes that occur in diverse contexts involving multiple stakeholders. Recently, research in entrepreneurship has begun to explore entrepreneurial processes through the lens of gender. However, unlike its entrepreneurship counterpart, innovation research has paid limited attention to gend...

Recognizing that developing economies experience various speeds of reforms and reversals, we investigate how such dynamic institutional changes influence whether firms continue expanding or begin receding from abroad, after having already inter-nationalized. In so doing, we extend the mixed gamble perspective by showing how external institutions im...

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...

SEJ Special Issue Call for Papers: Submission Due Date: July 9, 2023 The aim of this Special issue is to encourage scholars to advance new theoretical and empirical insights about entrepreneurial decision-making processes and outcomes in complex environments under conditions of uncertainty and competing goals. Accordingly, a wide repertoire of beh...

We extend relational demography theory by introducing kinship as a new demographic characteristic of categorization. We theorize that family firm employees’ kinship similarity (family vs. nonfamily), kinship tie (child vs. other familial relationship), and gender (female vs. male) uniquely affect their organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Dat...

Relatively little research examines the microfoundations of social responsibility in the small business setting, despite the demonstrated importance of entrepreneurs’ socially responsible behavior to their communities. Prior research suggests that although men and women are similar in their propensities to engage in helping behaviors, gender remain...

We develop a mixed gamble perspective of tax evasion that explains why family firms vary in how they weigh the costs and benefits of tax evasion. Testing our framework on family firms from India, we find that family firm identity is negatively related to tax evasion when firm performance is high. However, when firm performance is low, family firm i...

The purpose of our special issue is to demonstrate how a careers perspective can contribute to the study of family businesses and bring to light how the family business context extends and challenges career theories and concepts. Inspired by the studies in our special issue and our review of previous research, we propose a conceptual model that lev...

The following articles are intended for inclusion in the Special Section on Familial Organizations and International Business: Individual, Organizational and Institutional Variety in and beyond Asia. These were however published in a separate issue, Volume 37 Issue 1.

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...

We develop a novel, sense‐making perspective on corruption in transition economies. Prior research has focused on understanding why some entrepreneurs are more likely to pay bribes than others. It typically assumes that paying bribes will lead to an intended – albeit unfair – competitive advantage. We challenge this assumption and uncover a bribery...

Telecommuting has long been noted for its ability to foster work-family balance and job satisfaction. However, for employees seeking to advance in their careers, it is commonly advised to exercise caution, since telecommuting is often viewed as signaling a lack of dedication to one's career. Despite the prevalence of such advice, almost no research...

This study draws from the Conservation of Resources theory and Job Demands-Resources model to analyze how perceived organizational performance relates to managers' work-to-family conflict. We then explore how sources of supervisor support modify this relationship. Our study of 182 managers reveals that poor perceived organizational performance is s...

Previous studies suggest that individual career satisfiers such as earning wealth and developing relationships with employees are important drivers of intentions to start an entrepreneurial career. However, less is known about their effects on broader, downstream career decisions such as intentions to remain in entrepreneurial careers. Based on dat...

We address the challenges in understanding how family ownership shapes international business across institutional contexts in and beyond the Asia-Pacific, a region with diverse and often contradictory approaches to internationalization and family firms. We begin by introducing the topic and summarizing the papers in the special issue. We then deve...

Although participation of women in entrepreneurship continues to grow, a gender-performance gap persists. While the differential inputs and values perspectives have investigated both external and internal forces that help explain this gap, neither perspective has considered an important cognitive mechanism that captures gender differences: identity...

While previous studies focus on differences between family and nonfamily firms regarding CEO selection and executive compensation, this study investigates differences among family firms with different types of kinship ties. We find that, compared with family firms with close kinship ties, those with distant kinship ties are more likely to appoint a...

While prior research suggests that family firms are risk-averse with regards to internationalization, Hennart et al. (J Int Bus Stud, 2017) show that family firms selling high-quality niche products internationalize as much as their nonfamily-firm counterparts. Our Counterpoint extends Hennart et al.’s (2017) thesis by suggesting that this effect i...

Building on the institution-based view and agency theory, this paper studies the relationship between institutional development, family ownership, family leadership, and firm profitability in emerging markets. We propose that national institutional development reduces agency costs and improves the profitability of emerging market firms, but that th...

Despite efforts to address societal ills, social enterprises face challenges in increasing their impact. Drawing from the RBV, we argue that a social enterprise’s scale of social impact depends on its capabilities to engage stakeholders, attract government support, and generate earned-income. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 171 US-based socia...

Protecting family interests can affect the risk preferences of family firms relative to nonfamily firms. Given family firms' long-term orientation, we propose that they are less likely to suffer from myopic loss aversion, and therefore exhibit higher levels of downside risk, or the potential for loss, than nonfamily firms. We test these relationshi...

Our study illustrates how scientists contribute to the performance of innovative startups through an analysis of 211 Italian startups with and without scientist founders. Building upon imprinting theory, we hypothesize and find that scientists provide an advantage to innovative startups to the extent that they stimulate open innovation (i.e., searc...

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...

Research Summary: The unique preferences of family firms may lead to internationalization strategies that differ from those of nonfamily firms. Furthermore, heterogeneity among family firms may lead to variation in internationalization. From the mixed gamble perspective, we examine the internationalization of different types of family firms (weak f...

In a study of family firms that included survey responses from both family CEOs and family member employees, we examined the roles that collaboration and CEO monitoring play regarding the prevalence of extra-role behavior, an important human resource outcome that can impact job performance and firm performance. Results indicated that an integration...

Although many start-ups struggle to grow partly due to institutional voids in transitioning economies, empirical observations have contradicted this dominant view in the literature in that even with deficient formal institutions many economies (e.g., China) have high rates of entrepreneurship in recent years. To understand this paradox, we propose...

Organizational learning can be a key shared value that perpetuates the family's and the family firm's culture across generations. Imprinting theory helps to explain the impact that lessons learned and transmitted can have on the development of human resources in the family firm. However, the results of imprinting may not necessarily be positive, pa...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the differential effects of workplace stress and the use of social support by contingent vs standard employees. Design/methodology/approach Conservation of resources (COR) theory is used to frame research questions. Using content analysis of 40 interviews from individuals in the hospitality industry,...

This study tests a social exchange theory model that links firm family members' transactional and relational psychological contract obligations to firm performance. Evidence supports the hypotheses that organisational obligations are antecedents of individual contributions to firm performance in the psychological contract model. When family firms m...

This study tests a social exchange theory model that links firm family members' transactional and relational psychological contract obligations to firm performance. Evidence supports the hypotheses that organisational obligations are antecedents of individual contributions to firm performance in the psychological contract model. When family firms m...

We investigate what leads failed entrepreneurs to reenter entrepreneurship by taking a developmental career perspective. Specifically, we hypothesize that the age of failed entrepreneurs has a nonlinear relationship with the likelihood of reentering entrepreneurship that follows different career stages (early, middle, and late). The gender of faile...

Results of a survey of 211 founders of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) indicated that family involvement in the firm was indirectly related to four entrepreneurial outcomes (business performance, strategic planning, satisfaction with business success, and commitment to remain self-employed) through family-to-business support, suggesting a...

This study employs a multi-method research design to examine how remote workers, or employees who work solely from home, manage the work–family interface. Our qualitative study revealed that working from home creates unique challenges for remote workers because the work role becomes embedded in the family domain such that their home comes to be ass...