Central European Business Review 2019, 8(5):1-17 | DOI: 10.18267/j.cebr.231

The Role of Responsible Ownership and Family in Privately Held Firms with Multiple Owners: Preliminary Findings from the Czech Republic

Jiří Hnilica1, Lorraine M. Uhlaner2, Ondřej Machek3, Ales Kubíček4, Martin Lukeš5, Martin Jurek6, Petra Štamfestová7
1 University of Economics, Prague, Faculty of Business Administration, jiri.hnilica@vse.cz
2 EDHEC Business School, France. Email: lorraine.uhlaner@edhec.edu
3 University of Economics, Prague, Faculty of Business Administration, ondrej.machek@vse.cz
4 University of Economics, Prague, Faculty of Business Administration, ales.kubicek@vse.cz
5 University of Economics, Prague, Faculty of Business Administration, martin.lukes@vse.cz
6 University of Economics, Prague, Faculty of Business Administration, martin.jurek@vse.cz
7 University of Economics, Prague, Faculty of Business Administration, petra.stamfestova@vse.cz

In privately held firms, owners are a social group of people who are aware of, interact with, and influence each other. There are dynamic relationships between them and potential clashes between self- and collective interests. At the same time, the management literature suggests that family firms behave differently than non-family firms and follow a different set of goals. This paper introduces a research framework, sample and initial findings of the Responsible Ownership Project, which aims to contribute to our understanding of how attitudes and behaviours of owners in privately held firms may influence the economic and non-economic outcomes of their firms. The goals of the paper are to explore the role of family businesses among Czech private firms and to test whether the family plays a significant role in responsible ownership behaviours in private firms. Our descriptive statistics suggest that family businesses play a non-negligible role in the Czech economy. Using Student’s t-test for mean differences, we find a higher level of responsible ownership for family-owned vs non-family-owned firms. Finally, we present directions for future research and the expected contributions of the research project.

Keywords: responsible ownership, small and medium-sized enterprise,  family business
JEL classification: L26, M14

Received: November 17, 2019; Revised: January 11, 2020; Accepted: January 11, 2020; Prepublished online: January 19, 2020; Published: January 30, 2020  Show citation

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Hnilica, J., Uhlaner, L.M., Machek, O., Kubíček, A., Lukeš, M., Jurek, M., & Štamfestová, P. (2019). The Role of Responsible Ownership and Family in Privately Held Firms with Multiple Owners: Preliminary Findings from the Czech Republic. Central European Business Review, 8(5), 1-17. doi: 10.18267/j.cebr.231
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