Dr. Sean Valentine and Dr. Sanjay Goel presented at the 85th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management in Denmark

Research Highlight: Dr. Sanjay Goel, Professor of Entrepreneurship, and Dr. Sean Valentine, Chair and Professor of Management in the Middleton School of Entrepreneurship & Management, presented at the 85th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management in Denmark

Authors: Sanjay Goel (University of North Dakota), Tuuli Ikäheimonen (LUT University), Marita Rautiainen (LUT University), Sean Valentine (University of North Dakota)
Conference: 85th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, Copenhagen, Denmark, July 25-29, 2025
Paper Title: On Family Values and Firm Value: Ethical Perspectives in the Transparent Design of Governance in FBG

Abstract:
We develop a transparency-based framework for family business group (FBG) governance by applying three specific ethical perspectives – utilitarianism, deontology, and social contract theory. Our starting point is the context of FBGs – economic organizations embedded in reciprocal, multi-layered exchanges with stakeholder in their regions of operation via an owning family over multiple generation. As the owning family brings in other stakeholders to pursue its entrepreneurial ideas and grow the FBG, information asymmetry may arise about the owning family’s values, leading to friction due to incongruent goals, and an incongruent governance system that is incapable of creating a workable consensus around the goals of different stakeholders. It may thus be in the interest of ethically conscientious owning families to reduce this “values asymmetry” via the adoption of a transparency perspective in the governance system. We develop a conceptual framework that incorporates content and process transparency from the three ethical perspectives. The resultant governance system may improve goal congruence among the family and non-family stakeholders, and allow the owning family to pursue the entrepreneurial opportunities it sees in its environment. We offer several suggestions for research as well as practical implications based on our exposition.