Governance and entrepreneurship in family firms: Agency, behavioral agency and resource-based comparisons

There remains a good deal of uncertainty as to whether and under which governance conditions family firms, even large, publicly traded ones, are entrepreneurial. We shall argue that agency theory, behavioral agency perspectives, and the resource-based view all posit both positive and negative influences regarding entrepreneurship in family firms, while empirical studies, collectively, are no less ambiguous in their findings. We use each of the above theories to propose various governance distinctions that can reconcile these contradictions and suggest when family firms will be most and least entrepreneurial.