Christine Scheef
Title
Prof. Dr.
Last Name
Scheef
First name
Christine
Email
christine.scheef@unisg.ch
Phone
+41 71 224 71 36
24 results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 24
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Item type:Publication, Is more always better? The role of board committees in firm strategy(2025-03-20); Guoli ChenThe number of board committees has been steadily increasing over the past decade with board adding new board committees such as technology or sustainability committees. Prior research has mostly focused on specialized committees in isolation, but we know little about the potential trade-offs of establishing an increasing number of board committees and its aggregate effects on organizational outcomes. Building upon the organizational structure literature and attention-based view, this study argues that an increasing number of board committees reduces a firm’s strategic uniqueness and ultimately, economic value creation. These effects are mainly driven by board committees’ attention focus on monitoring and limited diversity, which both discourage the deviation from peers to go unique ways with the firm’s strategy. We further explore two contextualized conditions, lower diversity in board committees and the presence of specialized strategy committee, which moderate the relationships. Analysis of a sample of S&P 1500 firms for the period of 2005 – 2021 largely supports our theoretical arguments.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Is more always better? The cost of board committees(2024); Guoli ChenThe number of board committees has been steadily increasing over the past decade with boards adding new board committees such as technology, sustainability, finance, or strategy committees. Prior research has mostly focused on specialized committees in isolation, but we know little about the potential trade-offs of establishing an increasing number of board committees and its aggregate effects on organizational outcomes. Building upon the organizational structure literature and attention-based view, this study argues that an increasing number of board committees reduces a firm’s strategic uniqueness and ultimately, economic value creation. These effects are mainly driven by board committees’ attention focus on monitoring and limited diversity, which both discourage the deviation from peers to go unique ways with the firm’s strategy. We further explore two contextualized conditions, lower diversity in board committees and the presence of specialized strategy committee, which moderate the relationships. Analysis of a sample of S&P 1500 firms for the period of 2005 – 2021 largely supports our theoretical arguments.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Succession processes in family firms: A new temporal perspective(2024); Succession is the most prominent topic in family business research and the succession path that a family chooses will likely impact the future performance of the business. Yet surprisingly little is known about how management, board, and ownership is transitioned from one generation to the next. Using an inductive, theory-building approach based on sequence analysis and evidence from succession paths in 116 public family firms in the US, we address this gap. We introduce the concept of succession path, which describes how management, board, and ownership transitions are structured over time. Our study reveals six distinct succession paths, which vary in their pace and rhythm, but show high similarity in the sequence of the transition. Further, we study the firm performance consequences of succession paths. Specifically, we find that family firms with fast-paced succession paths and those with slow-paced, but rhythmic succession paths outperform those with slow-paced irregular rhythms. Further, early-ownership transitions benefit firm performance. Establishing succession paths as a meaningful new concept in family business research, this study not only advances our understanding of the succession phenomenon but also extends our theoretical insights into temporal processes in family firm successions.Type:conference paperJournal:International Family Enterprise Research Academy (IFERA) Annual Meeting - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Exploring the Impact of Founder Social Identities on Sustainable Business Model Design(2024); ; Designing sustainable business models gains increasing importance. Particularly in young firms, the founder’s social identity plays a pivotal role in shaping the creation of new ventures. Yet, founders with diverse social identities often pursue distinct goals, and there is limited understanding of how this divergence influences the design of sustainable business models. Drawing on two different founder social identities — Darwinian and Missionary founders —, we argue that founder social identities differently shape the sustainability of the business model design. In addition, we propose that entrepreneurial orientation mediates the relationship between the founder’s social identities and sustainable business model design. We collected survey data from 195 solo founders in Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland to test our research model. In support of our predictions, we find that Darwinian founders are negatively, and Missionary founders are positively related to sustainable business model design. We also show that entrepreneurial orientation partially mediates the link between Missionary founders and sustainable business model design, but not for Darwinian founders. Theoretical and practical insights on how founder social identities and entrepreneurial orientation can be leveraged to support sustainable business model designs are then discussed.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, How Do Founders' Value Creation Goals Combine With Strategic Entrepreneurship To Achieve Success?(2024); Drawing on the literature on strategic entrepreneurship and founder social identities, we use a configurational approach to study how new ventures’ entrepreneurial and strategic behaviors combine with founder social identities to explain new venture performance. Our analysis of 60 founders shows that founders can take different pathways to success and that founders who do not primarily pursue economic value creation can still achieve high new venture performance through distinct combinations of entrepreneurial and strategic behaviors. Our empirical findings and corresponding propositions advance the literature on strategic entrepreneurship and founder social identities in important ways.Type:conference paperJournal:Academy of Management (AOM) Annual Meeting - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Reputation at risk: The influence of stakeholder mobilization for family firms(2024); Marta ElviraResearch about the effects of firm reputation following a negative event remains equivocal. Some studies highlight the benefits accrued by high-reputation firms, while others point to the liabilities of a strong reputation. In this study, we propose that the inconsistencies in research findings may stem from insufficient attention to how stakeholders mobilize in response to perceived wrongdoings, either as individuals or collectively through class action lawsuits. We develop and test our hypotheses in the context of family firms, which are broadly recognized to have reputational advantages over nonfamily firms. By examining a unique dataset of individual and class-action customer lawsuits filed in federal courts against US firms between 2007 and 2019, our findings reveal a nuanced scenario. For family firms, a high reputation serves as a protective shield against lawsuits from individual customers, but becomes a vulnerability when facing collective actions by groups of customers. Our theory and findings offer novel insights into the complex interplay between firm reputation and stakeholder mobilization, especially within family business settings. This study enhances our understanding of how a firm’s reputation can differently shape stakeholder reactions in the aftermath of negative events.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Ownership matters! The benefits of appointing the predecessor CEO as board chair in family firm(2023); How does the appointment of a predecessor CEO as board chair (i.e., predecessor retention) affect post-succession firm performance? Agency theory suggests that firms with predecessor retention underperform compared to firms with other board chairs. We propose a stakeholder perspective rooted in incomplete contracting theory to highlight positive performance effects of predecessor retention. Stakeholders with firm-specific investments are concerned about being held up by new CEOs, which leads to negative stakeholder reactions upon CEO successions and post-succession performance declines. Because predecessor CEOs hold more firm-specific resources than other board chairs, they are well positioned to monitor and advise on stakeholder problems and mitigate performance declines after CEO successions. We identify family firms as a context in which the gains from mitigating negative stakeholder reactions outweigh the agency costs tied to predecessor retention. Probing a sample of CEO successions in the S&P 1500, we find that in family firms, predecessor retention leads to performance advantages over other board chairs, whereas the opposite holds true for nonfamily firms. We show that within the group of family firms, the performance advantages from predecessor retention increase in three contexts in which negative stakeholder reactions are pronounced: in outside CEO successions, in departures of long-tenured CEOs, and in firms with low complexity. Substantiating negative stakeholder reactions as the core mechanism, we show that predecessor retention decreases negative stakeholder reactions after CEO successions in family firms but not in nonfamily firms. Our study makes important contributions to the board chair and CEO succession literatures.Type:conference paperJournal:International Corporate Governance Society Conference, Madrid - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Does the Business Model Design Reflect the Founder Identity? An Empirical Investigation(2023-05); ; Social identities shape founders’ social motivation, self-evaluation, and frame of reference. However, little is known about how founder social identities shape new ventures’ business model designs. This study addresses this gap by arguing and empirically testing how and why founders with different social identities systematically design different business models. Specifically, we argue that Darwinian founders design efficiency-oriented business models, Communitarians design consumer-oriented business models, and Missionaries design sustainable-oriented business models. We also establish important boundary conditions of these relationships, particularly the core founder. We will test our predictions in a sample of 1‘019 new ventures from the German-speaking part of Europe. We contribute by establishing founder social identity as an important antecedent of business model designs and by linking founder social identities to firm strategy.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Succession processes in family firms: A new perspective(2023); Succession is the most prominent topic in family business research and the succession path that a family chooses will likely impact the future performance of the business. Yet surprisingly little is known about succession paths⸻the sequence, pace, and rhythm with which management, board, and ownership is transitioned from one generation to the next. Using an inductive, theory-building approach based on sequence analysis and evidence from succession paths in 142 public family firms in the US, we address this gap. Our study reveals nine distinct succession paths with five distinct sequences of how management, board, and ownership transitions are structured over time. These sequences not only vary in their pace and rhythm, but also in their performance consequences. Specifically, we find that family firms with fast-paced succession paths and those with slow-paced, rhythmic succession paths outperform those with irregular rhythms. Further, early-ownership transitions benefit firm performance. Establishing succession paths as a meaningful new concept in family business research, this study not only advances our understanding of the succession phenomenon but also extends our theoretical insights into temporal processes in family firm successions.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Make It Or Break It? Founder Social Identity, EO, And New Ventures' Financial Performance(2022-08); ; Type:conference paper
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