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depends upon the stewardship orientation of managers, which is characterized by decision
comprehensiveness, long-term orientation and participative governance (Corbetta and
Salvato, 2004; Miller et al., 2008).
In the real business world, family businesses might be considered incompatible with
entrepreneurship because of their tradition-bound, multi-generational characteristics.
According to the survey of Forbes magazine in 2012, family businesses comprise nearly
80% of the enterprises in North America; however, less than 60% survive to the second
generation, and only 12% survive to the third generation. Despite family businesses’
disadvantages compared to their non-family counterparts, particularly when the original
entrepreneurship gradually decays after succession, some family businesses still remain
entrepreneurial through corporate venturing activities. For example, some of the most
successful businesses in the U.S. are family owned, such as Wal-Mart, Ford Motor and News
Corp. Formosa Plastics Group, one of the most successful family businesses in Taiwan, is the
biggest diversified industrial company, with pretax profit of NT$43.5 billion ($1.5 billion) in
2012. Formosa has successfully expanded their business in polyvinyl chloride (more
commonly known as PVC), semiconductors, textiles and detergents, and has built factories
in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, the U.S., and Taiwan. The mixed outcomes of family
businesses in regard to entrepreneurial orientation thus require more empirical inquiries into
the black box of how the entrepreneurial orientation of family businesses is jointly shaped by
professional managers and founding family members.
In response to the recent calls for more inquiries into the entrepreneurial behaviors of
family businesses (Miller et al., 2008; Uhlaner, Kellermanns, Eddleston, and Hoy, 2012;
Dess, Pinkham, and Yang, 2011), the study centers on the effect of managerial stewardship
which shows the opposite nature of principal-agent conflict. We firstly investigate if
managers’ stewardship orientation triggers more company-wide exploration activities which
in turn shape the performance of new product development (NPD); that is, we propose a
stylized fact that explorative behaviors mediate the NPD effect of managerial stewardship.
Furthermore, one anomaly in the causality from managerial stewardship to entrepreneurial
orientation is the behavioral dynamics (i.e., exchanged information, coordination and
control, shared cognition) caused by family members’ social ties. We thus argue that family
social capital conditions the explorative effect of managerial stewardship. The research
framework of this study is depicted in Figure 1.