Introduction

The Concept of Family Business

Scholars most likely will be agree when someone state that the “family businesses” contribute to the economy and community significantly around the world. Evidently, many scholars showed the family businesses as nation gross domestic product (GDP) driver. This fact motivates scholars (both practitioners and researchers) and policymakers to study FB. According to Chua et al. (1999) “family business” is a venture which is possessed and controlled by “family members”. Similar to this, a family business (FB) can be described as a company (from home industry to big corporation) which its capital majority own by a family member (Rosenblatt et al., 1985; Dede & Ayranci, 2014) and key decision makers are family members (Rosenblatt et al., 1985). Further, scholars described that a business can be categorized as FB if there are multi-generation and dominant family elements that guarantee distinctive dynamics and sustainable relationships in FB (Chaudhary & Batra, 2018; Hussain & Ismail, 2015).

We can also view an FB as “a company where the voting majority is in the hands of the controlling family; including the founder(s) who intend to pass the business on to their descendants” (International Finance Corporation (IFC), 2018, p. 13). FB is a profit-seeking business. The character of a “family” business will remain attached to a business even though the business may have been managed by a CEO who is not a family member, but majority of the stock are still possessed by members of the company's founding family. Although the CEO is not a family member but as the main shareholder, they play a role in the decision-making process as well as in forming and formulating the vision and mission of the business (Lee et al., 2017; Mukarram et al., 2018; Panicker, 2017; Ye et al., 2019). Based on the above definition, we may argue an FB is not always managed by family members, but they possess most of its capital.