Research On The Relationship Among Familial Resource,Entrepreneurial Orientation And Enterprise Performance

Abstract:As private economic entities, family enterprises in China have done great contributions to the growth of national economy. However, many studies have shown that only few family enterprises can successfully achieve the intergenerational inheritance, which abstracts the great interest of academic to study family enterprises. Current researches focus on the inheritance pattern of family enterprises and governance mechanism, and the researches combining family enterprises and entrepreneurship are still relatively rare. In fact, the inheritance of family enterprises is the continuous process of entrepreneurial spirit. In that process, what role does family resource play as a source of competitive advantage, and whether it has an impact on entrepreneurial activities are concerned by theory and practice community.This paper takes the family enterprises realizing successfully intergenerational inheritance as the study objects from the prospective of resource base theory. How each dimension of familial resource affect the entrepreneurial orientation and performance of family enterprises, and how each dimension of entrepreneurial orientation affect the performance are studied theoretically and empirically to probe into the intrinsic relationship and functional mechanism between the familial resource, entrepreneurial orientation and performance of family enterprises. To accomplish the objectives above, this paper first extracts the dimensions of familial resource on the basis of investigation and interview and constructs a theoretical model to analyze the impact of family resources on entrepreneurial orientation and performance. Around the theoretical model and research hypotheses, validity and reliability analysis are used to screen scale items, and then structural equation model techniques is used to analyze and test the theoretical model and research hypotheses.The main innovations of this paper are as follows:First, this paper conducts a qualitative study on family businesses with successful intergenerational heritage. Based on interviews and by means of Nvivo8.0software, I point out that familial resource consists of six resource dimensions and achieve a higher sort of familial resources dimensions. The generation of the six resource dimensions comes from mainly their universality, strong family influence, as well as the core competitiveness characteristics, which are reputation dimension, experience dimensions, learning dimension, decision-making dimension, interpersonal dimension and network relation dimension respectively, and they together constitute the structural model of familial resource. This conclusion not only helps us further understand the connotation and characteristics of familial resource, but it also provides a clear theoretical framework on the assessment of the role of familial resource.Secondly, this paper integrates familial resource, entrepreneurial orientation and business performance together into the family business entrepreneurial environment with successful intergenerational transmission, and takes familial resource as an exogenous latent variable, entrepreneurial orientation and business performance as endogenous latent variables, entrepreneurial orientation as well as an intermediary adjustment variable. Then I analyze the relationship between these three main variables and their sub-dimensions. The research model with systematically integration above is still rare in the family entrepreneurship research. And under the background of Chinese transformation economic I first study family businesses with successful intergenerational transmission. The conclusions show that familial resource has a positive effect on entrepreneurial orientation, some dimensions of familial resource produce different effects on each dimension of entrepreneurial orientation, and both together have a positive effect on business performance. This paper reveals the relationship among familial resource, entrepreneurial orientation and performance, as well as the adjustment function of entrepreneurial orientation on the relationship between familial resource dimensions and enterprise performance.Thirdly, with entrepreneurial orientation regard as a mediating variable between familial resource and performance of family enterprises, we construct and test the partial mediation model about the impact of family resources on the performance of family enterprises, and confirm three dimensions of family resources have indirect impact on performance through the intermediary function of entrepreneurial orientation and also have a direct impact, which contributes to further understanding of what family resources influence the intergenerational inheritance of family enterprises.