Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Publication Title

Asia Pacific Journal of Management

Keywords

family firm, FDI, family CEO, generation, SEW, international experience, buisness group, India

Abstract

Family firm research has upheld that generation of top family-based executives (including CEOs) plays a significant role in strategy development and governance. A key growth strategy undertaken by family firms around the world, including the Asia-Pacific region, is internationalization. But how generation of family CEO impacts family firm internationalization, particularly outward FDI (OFDI), remains largely overlooked. Drawing on the family firm and internationalization literature and utilizing the socioemotional wealth (SEW) logic, we examine in this study the influence that family CEO generation (founder versus later) has on family firm’s extent of OFDI. We also investigate the extent to which two important contingencies—family CEO’s international experience and firm’s business group affiliation—influence the relationship between CEO generation and extent of OFDI. We test our hypotheses using a longitudinal panel dataset of family firms from India. Our findings provide evidence that later generation CEO-led family firms, compared to those led by the founder CEOs, exhibit lower extent of OFDI. Our results further demonstrate that OFDI extent is greater in later generation CEO-led family firms when their CEOs possess international experience and when the firms are affiliated to business groups.

Funding Source

This article was published Open Access thanks to a transformative agreement between Milner Library and Springer Nature.

DOI

10.1007/s10490-025-10053-1

Comments

First published in Asia Pacific Journal of Management (2025): https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-025-10053-1

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