The Relationship Between Work-Family Initiatives and Corporate Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Family and Non-Family Smes

The adoption of work-family initiatives (WFIs) has been associated with a wide range of effects on both employees, such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, work motivation, and organizations, such as improved performance, decreased personnel turnover or improved shareholder returns. By offering WFIs, companies provide a signal of care towards their employees and their non-work concerns and are motivating them to participate more actively and more creatively in the work activities. However, what recent works highlight is that the link between WFI and corporate entrepreneurship has received scant attention, especially in the context of small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). This paper makes a first step to fill such gap. Additionally, this paper explores whether (and how) family SMEs behave differently from non-family SMEs; the relationship between being a family firm and gaining from WFIs is non-obvious and theoretically interesting for both WFI and family business literatures. Based on survey-based data from manufacturing SMEs in Northern Italy, we find that corporate entrepreneurship is more likely to manifest in firms that extensively adopt WFIs, meaning, in firms that adopt more than one WFI. Furthermore, and contrarily to what hypothesized, we show that the relationship between the adoption of WFIs the likelihood to engage in corporate entrepreneurship is weaker in family SMEs.