The Combinations of Market and Non-Market Strategies That Facilitates Family Firm Survival

Abstract

Even though family firms are characterized by an overlap between the family and business systems, family business research has focused separately on how family firms compete (i. e., strategic behavior) and how families are involved their firms (i. e., types of family orientation). With the aim of closing this research gap, we draw on the heterogeneity principle of family firms and the equifinality principle of the configurative approach to conjecture that family firms can successfully adjust their strategic behavior and family business orientation in a variety of ways to enhance their likelihood of survival. We follow a sample of Spanish family firms over an 11-year period (2004–2015) to test our model. Based on the Kaplan–Meier survival estimator and the Cox proportional hazard model, we find that survival likelihood is higher when firms combine a differentiation strategy with a business-first or a family-enterprisefirst orientation or when firms follow a low-cost strategy with a family-first orientation.