Abstract
Looking at the future while constantly protecting the own values and traditions is critical for family firms. Within this strong tension between preservation and adaptation, I identified the concepts of organizational identity and organizational authenticity as of extraordinary importance for this type of organizations. The main purpose of my dissertation is to capture how family firms evolve and engage in decision-making processes while being true to themselves. To do so, in the first chapter, I conceptually examine how heterogeneity of family firms’ organizational identities influences, and is affected by, strategic decisions. I ground my conceptual investigation in the ideal context of disruptive innovation, a technology shift that might eventually threaten the traditional solution of an incumbent family firm. The second chapter provides insights on the attributes and cognitive mechanisms that affect perceptions of stakeholder salience for family firms. Building on the key tenet that the coexistence of family and business identities creates a unique stakeholder setting, I offer a typology of response scenarios to stakeholder claims that bridges relational (i.e., stakeholder-firm relationship) and cognitive (i.e., goals) elements. Shifting my theoretical focus from the concept of organizational identity to organizational authenticity, in the third chapter, I provide a richer consideration of the processual nature of organizational authenticity, building on a longitudinal field study of Masi Agricola, a seventh-generation family-owned Italian wine producer which repeatedly went through new processes of authentication to restore consistency between internal values and external expressions. Overall, I generate new theoretical insights at the intersection of strategic management and organizational theory by integrating novel findings from the family business context. With this thesis I contribute advancing a multifaceted and dynamic understanding of how family firms deal with their true selves.