Abstract
Family businesses have traditionally been recognised for their trustworthiness and reputation. Interestingly, the extant literature suggests the influence of reputation and trust on family businesses’ long-term financial success. However, despite the increasing attention the topic has received, a comprehensive overview of trust and reputation in family businesses remains lacking. The current study aims to critically examine and review the extant research on trust and reputation in the context of family businesses and uncover current research trends and future research opportunities. We identified and critically analysed 93 studies through a stringent search protocol and content analysis to achieve the research objective. Based on thematic analysis, we identified four clusters reflecting family business research on trust and reputation. The key outcome is the elucidation of research themes and potential research questions exploring drivers and consequences of trust and reputation. The findings indicate that trust and reputation are crucial for developing relationships with stakeholders and achieving economic and non-economic goals. We integrate our findings into a theoretical framework that can serve to motivate future research. We conclude by clarifying the limitations of our research, offering actionable implications for researchers and family business managers and attempting theory development by raising new research questions.
Highlights
Businesses are often characterised by majority ownership within a family (Dede & Ayranci, 2014)
We propose the following research questions: RQ1: What is the research profile of existing studies on trust and reputation? RQ2: What are the emergent themes in the relevant literature? RQ3: What are the research gaps and potential research questions providing avenues for Journal of Business Research 137 (2021) 143–161 future research? We attempt to address the above research questions following
Four research themes emerged from our literature review based on a critical review of the selected studies: (a) theoretical underpinning of trust and reputation in family firms, such as organisational identity, socioeconomic wealth, stewardship, agency, signalling, social capital, stake holder and institutional theories (Fig. 7); (b) Trust, reputatation, and stakeholders; (c) consequents of family businesses’ trust and reputation in terms of economic and non-economic goals; (d) drivers of trust and reputation; and I methodology
Summary
Businesses are often characterised by majority ownership within a family (Dede & Ayranci, 2014). More over, we currently lack a broader theoretical perspective on the drivers and outcomes of trust and reputation because scholars have yet to un dertake a systematic review examining existing knowledge and offering such an integrative framework. SLRs contribute to the existing literature by synthesising research and creating new insights for future research (Tranfield et al, 2003; Kaur et al, 2021). Our study contributes to the existing literature by systematically reviewing the findings of 93 articles on trust and reputation published in academic journals. Our review contributes to the extant family business literature by illuminating scholarly interest in reputation and trust. We contribute to current work by illuminating emergent themes in the existing literature, in terms of theoretical lenses, drivers of trust and reputation, and the benefits of trust and reputation. Consistent with recent SLR studies (e.g., Christofi et al, 2019; Sahu, Padhy, & Dhir, 2020), our study span three distinct steps: specifying the research objective, outlining the research protocol and, report ing the study findings
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