Socioemotional wealth

: en påverkningsfaktor av beslut i svenska familjeföretag?

Abstract

The family business form is a fascinating and widespread business form where exciting distinctive characteristics develop and drive businesses in their own manner. The distinctive characteristics that define the different family businesses are leading to research on the business from becoming increasingly captivating and colorful. These distinctive characteristics will be explained in more depth later in this paper, but a generic name for these family-specific characteristics is socioemotional wealth.

Furthermore, value creation in companies is created by implementing or developing different strategies in one way or another. The path to an effective and impactful strategy begins with the decision maker gathering the relevant information. This way, information gathering is initiated to help the decision maker develop their strategy in the best possible manner. Differing degrees of rationality can however be used by the decision maker when it comes to information gathering.

The purpose of this paper is to discover how socioemotional wealth affects strategic decisions made within family businesses. The paper will focus on how socioemotional wealth affects strategic decisions and, in particular, how it affects the degree of rationality in strategic decision making.

By adopting a deductive approach, the paper will tackle the above purpose using theories from similar topics. Additionally, a quantitative method, in the form of a survey, will also be used to obtain empirical data from family businesses in order to validate the empiricism and findings against the hypothesis.

The findings of this essay will in part strengthen the findings of previous research within the field socioemotional wealth; family businesses demonstrate a high degree of socioemotional wealth within their companies. However, no significant empirical evidence can be localized to support a conclusion that a high degree of socioemotional wealth entails a low degree of rationality when it comes to strategic decision making within family businesses.