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Disassembling the influences of perceived family relational conflict on business family offspring’s intrapreneurial intentions

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Abstract

Entrepreneurial business family offspring are key figures in helping family businesses achieve transgenerational entrepreneurship. However, a global survey reveals that entrepreneurial offspring avoid the family business when conducting entrepreneurial activities. Our study makes the first effort to explore what reduces business family offspring’s intrapreneurial intentions in the family business context. Applying a mixed-method approach, we conduct 18 explorative interviews, a pretest of 124 Chinese business family offspring, and a formal survey of 131 Chinese business family offspring approaching their career decision point. We realize that growing up in family businesses often exposes offspring to two types of perceived family relational conflicts that their parents’ entrepreneurial endeavors incur, which we define as “big-family” and “parent-offspring” relational conflicts. Our empirical results suggest that the relationship between perceived family (i.e., parent-offspring and big-family) relational conflict and family business intrapreneurial intentions were serially mediated by family relational outcome expectation and family relational self-efficacy. Contributions to family business research and social cognitive career theory are discussed.

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Notes

  1. 1. The published 2018 GUESSS report does not show the exact percentage of business family offspring’s entrepreneurial intentions and intrapreneurial intentions. The figures of 37.2% and 8.9% in the introduction were obtained through our calculations. We contacted the authors of the GUESSS report, and they agreed with these calculations.

    We calculated the figure of 37.2% in the following way: according to the 2018 GUESSS report (page 20), 23.7% of all respondents were of family business backgrounds. Specifically, 13.9% indicated that their father is an entrepreneur; and 3.7% indicated the same for their mother; 6.1% did so for both parents. According to Figure 20 on page 20, 35.4% of the students whose father is an entrepreneur are intentional founders, 38.4% of the students whose mother is an entrepreneur are intentional founders, 40.4% of the students whose parents are both entrepreneurs are intentional founders. Assuming the number of the whole sample is N, we made the following calculation to get the percentage of business family offspring’s entrepreneurial intentions: [35.4%*(13.9%*N) + 38.4%*(3.7%*N) + 40.4%*(6.1%*N)]/23.7%*N = 37.2%.

    We calculated the figure of 8.9% in the following way: according to the 2018 GUESSS report (page 20), 23.7% of all respondents were of family business backgrounds, and 2.1% of all respondents (page 4) intended to succeed the family business five years after completing the study. Assuming the number of the whole sample is N, we made the following calculation to get the percentage of business family offspring’s succession intentions: (2.1%*N)/(23.7%*N) = 8.9%. Since succeeding the family business includes remaining in the family business and doing something new in the family business (i.e., intrapreneurship), we estimated that business family offspring’s intrapreneurial intentions are no higher than 8.9%.

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Table 6 Variable measurements and reliability tests

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Wang, D., Zhang, Z. Disassembling the influences of perceived family relational conflict on business family offspring’s intrapreneurial intentions. Int Entrep Manag J 18, 153–189 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-021-00747-5

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