Family Firms' Specific Requirements when Recruiting Non-Family Top Management Team Members - The Case of the Chief Financial Officer

Description

Non-family Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) are often the first non-family members on a family firm's (FF's) top management team. FFs possess idiosyncratic resources that influence their personnel decisions and the resources they look for when hiring employees. These peculiarities should also affect the requirements FFs look for when hiring non-family CFOs. To analyze these FF-specific requirements when hiring non-family CFOs, this paper takes a qualitative research approach and draws on semi-structured interviews with FF owners, CEOs and non-family CFOs. The findings suggest four crucial groups of CFO requirements: education, functional know-how, career path and personal/social attributes. Compared with non-family firms (NFFs), FFs were found to attach less importance to a non-family CFO's formal education, while demanding a similar level of functional know-how. The findings further suggest that FF owners actively seek to integrate non-family CFOs with professional NFF experience in order to enrich the FF's resource set. At the same time, non-family CFOs are required to adapt to the specific characteristics of FF governance. Finally, FFs were identified as valuing the personal/social fit between owners and non-family CFOs higher compared with NFFs.

Period	13 Jun 2012
Event title	57th International Council for Small Business (ICSB) World Conference 2012
Event type	Conference
Location	New ZealandShow on map