Content area
Full text
1. Introduction
Several scholars acknowledge that leaders who found, own and manage family businesses influence the latter's culture, values and performance ([35] Schein, 1983; [26] Lussier and Sonfield, 2009). These leaders are considered more intuitive than professional managers, since they are highly visible and are more willing to pursue non-economic objectives and pay attention to family ties ([35] Schein, 1983). Furthermore, family business leaders do not only impact their businesses while they are managing, but they can continue to do so after they are retired ([18] Kelly et al. , 2000) or even after they pass away ([25] Le Breton-Miller and Miller, 2008; [26] Lussier and Sonfield, 2009). Additionally, since the 1980s studies have highlighted that family business leaders are, consciously or unconsciously, influenced by different systems ([37] Sharma, 2004). [40] Tagiuri and Davis (1982/1996), for example, argue that all members of a family business - leader or otherwise - are driven by three "subsystems"; namely the ownership, company and family subsystems. While [3] Bauer (1993) demonstrates that small family business (SFB) leaders are guided by three "heads"; namely the family, business and power heads. Despite these key contributions in the existing body of literature, research pertaining to family business leaders is sparse ([7] Brockhaus, 1994; [37] Sharma, 2004).
In this research, we attempt to shed some light on those four aspects of the SFB, by placing the role of the leader - who is also the founder - in the centre of our analysis. To this end, we rely on the concept of logics of action, which emanates from organisational sociology theory ([6] Bernoux et al. , 1996). The concept is designed to understand organisational situations and/or conflicts and is defined by [5] Bernoux (1985) as the interrelationship between a set of representations, values, norms and attitudes and when taken together influences an individual's behaviour within a given context. In other words, [5] Bernoux (1985) stipulates that different individuals if placed within an identical organisational context will exhibit different actions and take different decisions based on their respective logics of action. Axiomatically, the concept when applied to SFBs implies that differing management styles and treatment of family and non-family employees are the direct results of SFB leaders' differing logics of actions. This premise...