The assistant professor of management’s co-authored research is published in Family Business Review.
David Jiang, assistant professor of management in the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business, has co-authored the article, “Unmasking the social ghost in the machine: How the need to belong and family business potency affect family firm performance,” which is published in Family Business Review.
In the article, Jiang and co-authors Nastaran Simarasl, Cal Poly Pomona; Franz W. Kellermanns, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; and Bart J. Debicki, Towson University; answer theoretical calls for more need-based psychological research in family firms, introduce family business potency to the literature, and contribute to research on family firm heterogeneity.
“Research often assumes that a controlling family’s social bonds contribute to superior firm performance,” the authors wrote in the article’s abstract. “However, there is little theory to address these relationships and findings are often mixed. Here, we integrate resource-based and need-to-belong theories to address these issues, introducing family business potency as a key mediating variable between family cohesion, participative strategy processes, and firm performance in 109 family firms.”
The co-authors introduce and test the concept of family business potency – which refers to a family firm’s controlling family members’ belief that their firm can be effective – as a mediator between family firm specific proxies (family cohesion and participative strategy processes) for the need to belong and firm performance. They find that family business potency has a direct influence on firm performance and that family business potency mediates family cohesion’s relationship with firm performance. However, family business potency does not mediate participative strategy processes’ relationship with firm performance.
Jiang and co-authors express concern for an improved understanding in social affiliation in family firms: “Aiming to offer a social psychological view of family firm heterogeneity, we therefore hope that research will begin using findings contained herein as a foundation for better understanding social affiliation and belonging in family firms and the unique family specific resources that it can create.”
Family Business Review (FBR) is the leading scholarly journal devoted exclusively to family-controlled enterprises.
Jiang joined Elon in 2020. Previously, he was an assistant professor of entrepreneurship in Georgia Southern University’s Parker College of Business. He received his Ph.D in Business Administration from the University of Tennessee. Jiang’s research applies psychological and sociological approaches to understand unique entrepreneurship and family business phenomena. He serves on the editorial boards of Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice and Family Business Review.