"Family Business Leaders’ Metaphors and Firm Performance: Exploring the “Roots” and “Shoots” of Symbolic Meanings"

To investigate the complex dynamics when family members with differing perceptions and interpretations of reality jointly lead their family business, this research published in Family Business Review adopts an epistemic-operative interview technique using Morgan’s images of organization. The authors, Alessandra Tognazzo  (Assistant Professor in  Family business & Business organization at the Department of Economics and Management "Marco Fanno" of the University of Padova) and Donald Neubaum (DeSantis Distinguished Professor in Management & Entrepreneurship in the College of Business at Florida Atlantic University) explore how family leaders’ root metaphors, which are symbolic frames that help understand individuals’ attitudes and behaviors, are linked to family businesses’ behavior and performance. Analyzing six Italian family hotels, they derive four structures of family symbolic meanings and explain how and why relationships and innovation are mechanisms through which firm performance is related and connected to the offshoots of the meanings of family leaders’ root metaphors.

Read the full article on:
https://bit.ly/paper_alessandratognazzo