Publicação
Of ghosts and strangers in family firms: the founder’s shadow in the organization’s daily life
| datacite.subject.fos | Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão | |
| dc.contributor.advisor | Neves, Pedro | |
| dc.contributor.author | Dinis, Liliana Brioso Martins de Andrade | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2026-07-06T09:05:33Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2026-07-06T09:05:33Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024-01-29 | |
| dc.date.submitted | 2023-08 | |
| dc.description.abstract | The influence of a founder in a family business, constitutes a significant yet understudied aspect of family business research. This thesis is a combination of three distinct studies, each one building on the previous and going further in the understanding of the founder’s shadow concept. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the founder's enduring impact not only at the organizational level, but also on its stakeholders. We start our journey by going deeper on the notion that the founder’s impact is only significant on the immediate subsequent generations. Through a qualitative study, we investigate 25 family firms, and our findings reveal that founders cast a long-lasting shadow over multiple generations and that it may even persist beyond the founding family’s ownership. Ou study reveals the pivotal role of the community of employees in perpetuating the founder’s shadow, showing that keeping the shadow alive is not only a family matter, but also a bottom-up movement. This is a very important insight which helps us understand the importance and positive implications of such an enduring influence. Maintaining the shadow is contributing to the reinforcement of collective identity. The second study seeks to formally conceptualize and measure the notion of the founder's shadow. To better understand the relationships and importance of such construct, we need a reliable measure. Therefore, we initiated a rigorous process of defining and validating a comprehensive scale. From the previous qualitative study, we identified 154 potential scale items. Subsequent external validation streamlined this to a robust 31-item scale. With factor analytic techniques, we retained four distinct dimensions: founder employee-centred leadership, founder reputation, founder leadership mimicry, and founder relationship orientation. Our scale, thus established, demonstrated high reliability, and opened the way for new research opportunities. Finally, our last study built on the previous works to respond to the academic community’s call for better measurement tools in the family business field (Pearson et al., 2014). We tested the scale’s applicability and efficacy in predicting organizational outcomes. Through two quantitative studies encompassing 479 respondents, we shed light on pivotal implications on behavioural intentions, attitudes towards the organization and work. | eng |
| dc.identifier.tid | 101647743 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10362/204339 | |
| dc.language.iso | eng | |
| dc.relation | SFRH/BD/131115/2017 | |
| dc.rights.uri | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | |
| dc.subject | Family firms | eng |
| dc.subject | Founder’s influence | eng |
| dc.subject | Imprinting | eng |
| dc.subject | Scale development | eng |
| dc.title | Of ghosts and strangers in family firms: the founder’s shadow in the organization’s daily life | eng |
| dc.type | doctoral thesis | |
| dspace.entity.type | Publication | |
| thesis.degree.name | Dissertation, presented as part of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Management |