Difficulties in Building Relationships with External Stakeholders: A Family-Firm Perspective

Joanna Sadkowska
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Joanna Sadkowska: Management Faculty, University of Gdansk, 80-309 Gdansk, Poland

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 12, 1-18

Abstract: Currently, there is a growing number of businesses which organize their operations in the form of projects. One of the key success factors in the area of project management is building successful relationships with project stakeholders. Using stakeholder theory perspective and looking through the lens of family involvement, the study addresses two research questions: 1. how do family firms perceive the difficulty in building relationships with external stakeholders compared to other project management difficulties; 2. does organizing work in the form of projects redefine the significance of family involvement in the difficulties of building relationships with external stakeholders. To answer these questions, 154 Polish family-owned enterprises, considered as representatives of Eastern European emerging economies, were surveyed. The results indicate that family involvement strongly influences the difficulties in building relationships with external stakeholders, but only in those companies which at the time of the survey were not managing projects. In the firms employing project management practices, only the factor related to increasing the number of employees had a facilitating effect on the studied phenomenon. On the contrary, in the case of family firms not managing projects, the growth in the number of employees increased the difficulty in building relationships with external stakeholders. The findings add to the research on the role of family involvement in building relationships with a firm’s external stakeholders.

Keywords: family firms; Eastern European emerging economies; family involvement; project management; external stakeholders (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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