دانلود رایگان مقاله همکاری بین کسب و کار خانوادگی در اندازه های مختلف

Abstract

For family businesses, entering into inter-firm cooperation with another family business can be a fruitful strategy for sustaining business success and ensuring survival. However, the typical characteristics of family businesses (e.g. informal organisation structures, restrictive information policy) imply a lower propensity to combine resources on an inter-firm level—which becomes even more prevalent when the relationship is asymmetrical. Against the background that, however, not only research focusing on the cooperation tendencies of family businesses is underdeveloped, but also studies on asymmetrical inter-firm relationships are scant, we aim at examining business-related prerequisites for cooperation between family businesses of different size. By employing a qualitative research design, we gain insights into the importance of similarities in terms of a shared history and synergies in terms of mission and values (i.e., familiness) for balancing deficits in power, from the perspective of the smaller partner. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the development of trust between the cooperation partners, through the active demonstration of a track record as a reliable business partner, as well as making good on promises made, can also aid the long-term success of the cooperation in spite of differences in size and scale of the family businesses involved.

5. Conclusion

In line with previous studies (see for example, Hatak & Roessl, 2011; Niemelä, 2004; Roessl, 2005; Roessl et al., 2010), we can conclude from our content analysis that despite both distillery and brewery owners stating that they believe they are in an equal partnership, evidence quickly emerges from the interviews that suggests a power imbalance in favour ofthe larger brewery in terms of the dependency and resources invested. Despite this disparity, the cooperation has continued to flourish. We propose that this can be attributed to several factors. Firstly, it is the similarity between the two businesses, notin terms of size of operations butin terms of vision, values and “familiness”. Also, the brewery and the distillery see a lot of significance in their role as a local family business and take this responsibility seriously; this can go some way to reduce the risk of the larger brewery taking advantage of the smaller distillery, as reputations can be quickly ruined due to close community ties. Another key success factor in this particular cooperation is the building of a proven track record as a reliable and trustworthy business partner (Eddleston, Chrisman, Steier, & Chua, 2010). This establishes the necessary amount of trust capital and may also help to diminish the risk to the smaller partner of opportunism on the part of the larger business. The result of this trust in interfamily firm cooperation is an improved communication flow and a reduced need for costly legal intervention.