The "Guanxi" Type's Influence On Organizational Coordination In Family Firms

Family firm is a greatly significant form of business organization in the world. For a long time, the research about family firms have been focused on the intergenerational transmiss-ion, governance structure, organizational structure, etc., but the issue of family firm's organizational coordination rarely involved. As the influence of traditional culture in the family firm, the Guanxi have appeared orderly-diversity pattern, according to the different distance, can be divided into family members, acquaintances and strangers. This paper att--empts to completely, clearly descript family firms how to use a variety of organizational coordination mechanisms to achieve the company's daily operations and achieve organizat-ional goals, under the Guanxi's influence, and explain and analysis them by transaction cost theory. In this paper, we have interviews with four family firms, which located in Shanghai, Shanghai around and inland, make integrated use of typical case studies and more cases one by one copy study to do exploratory research.About the organizational coordination in family firms, through literature review and sum-mary, we have decided to analysis it from the task/resource coordination mechanisms, decision-making coordination mechanism and incentive/restraint mechanisms. The results showed that, under the influence by Guanxi types, the organizational coordination mecha--nisms demonstrates the following characteristics:First, in applying working resource and receive important tasks, as the value and scarcity of resource and important task, family are very sensitive and think highly of transaction cost, but, bounded rationality, information asymmetry and opportunism make the transaction cost high, so family and acquaintances have easier access to these opportunities. Second, in decision-making coordination, high-level decision will produce heavy transaction cost, on the contrary, the personality and ability of entrepreneur surely reduce the utility of transaction cost, consequently, the family firms usually use personal(experience) decision-making to make high-level decision. Last the incentive/constraint staff, family usually choose most economic performance evaluati--on methods, making leader evaluate the staff, so family members and acquaintances easily get invisible care and thus obtain material rewards, besides, they have more opportunities to be promoted, moreover the leader's trust and recognition will directly decide the outcome.