Turkish delight a public affairs study on family business: The influence of owners in the entrepreneurship orientation of family‐owned businesses

• Author: Phil Harris,Ozlem Ozdemir
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2082
• Date: 01 February 2020
• Published date: 01 February 2020

ACADEMIC PAPER

Turkish delight a public affairs study on family business:

The influence of owners in the entrepreneurship

orientation of family-owned businesses

Phil Harris

1

| Ozlem Ozdemir

2

1

Executive Director, Business Research

Institute, Westminster Chair of Marketing and

Public Affairs, University of Chester, Chester,

England, UK

2

Faculty of Business and Management,

Regent's University, London, UK

Correspondence

Dr Ozlem Ozdemir, Faculty of Business and

Management, Regents University, London,

England.

Email: ozdemiro@regents.ac.uk

Family-owned businesses (FOBs) are as unique as the families that own and control

them. As reported by Miller, Steier, and Le Breton-Miller (2003, p.513), the founders

of many of these businesses try to continue their legacy and ensure continued family

control via intergenerational succession, as when they hand over leadership to their

children. The initial statistics suggest only approximately one third of FOBs survive

into the second generation, with just 12% remaining “viable”by the third, and only

about 3% operating into the fourth generation or beyond. Thus, one of the central

problems for FOBs is this inability to ensure competent cross-generational family

leadership through successful transfer of ownership and management to the next

family generation. This is a core issue for the modern public affairs practitioner and

policy maker, nationally and internationally, and the Turkish case is a good example

of the multicomplex issues evident in succession planning and leadership for business

founders and leaders in these organisations.

A firm's strategic orientation is an indicator of the processes developed to integrate

new information, to coordinate decisions, to examine the evolution of environmental

factors, and to assess new projects (Escriba-Esteve, Sanchez-Peinado & Sanchez-Pei-

nado, 2009). However, few studies have provided a framework that jointly analyses

the FOB owner characteristics, the mediating processes and attitudes by which

owners shape the direction of their family firms, and the effect of these postures on

firm performance.

This paper addresses the influence of family business owner, over the behaviour of

FOBs. By treating FOB owners' characteristics as predictors of a firm's strategic ori-

entation, we seek to provide a deeper understanding of how the characteristics of

FOB owners shape decision making process and FOBs' behaviours in order to suc-

cessfully survive in generations. This study introduced the concept of FOB's entre-

preneurship orientation (EO) as a variable that mediates between FOB owners'

characteristics and business performance. The objective of this paper is twofold:

(a) to identify the demographic predictors FOBs' EO and (b) to analyse the role of EO

as a mediator of the relationship between FOB owners' characteristics and FOBs'

performance.

DOI: 10.1002/pa.2082

J Public Affairs. 2020;20:e2082. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 1of11

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2082