Resumen de Strategic ambidexterity in family firms: exploring linkages between familiness, strategic alignment and family firm performance
How family firms succeed in the short term and survive in the long term is still not well understood. This question is increasingly relevant as the growing pace of change in business environments requires firms to adapt and transform to maintain their competitive edge. Research shows that organizations can succeed and survive by becoming ambidextrous i.e. by improving current business strategies (exploiting) while preparing new strategies to meet future market challenges and opportunities (exploring) and managing the internal tensions and conflicting demands arising from the contradictory nature of exploitation and exploration. The idiosyncratic characteristics of family firms suggest this type of organization may be particularly suited to balance exploitation and exploration strategies. Surprisingly, to date, scant research has explored ambidexterity in family firms.
Drawing from the resource based view, the dynamic capabilities approach and central tenets of strategic management; this dissertation builds bridges between family business literature and ambidexterity research to explore the relationship between family influence and the ability of the family firm to develop strategic ambidexterity. Based on qualitative data from longitudinal in-depth case studies, the present research examines how family firms can leverage family influence to achieve short-term competitiveness and long-term survival through ambidextrous strategies.
The results of our empirical analysis, guided by twenty one theoretically grounded propositions, suggest that family businesses can indeed leverage their unique resources, capabilities and organizational conditions (i.e. familiness) to manage and overcome changes that erode their competitive advantage by leveraging existing assets and capabilities from maturing areas of their business to gain competitive advantage in emerging business domains. However, to do so, they need to actively manage the family influence in their firms to their advantage. This research provides tools to examine this family influence and recommendations to manage familiness to the advantage of family firms.
