Organizational culture and dynamics of leadership teams in family businesses

Abstract

Scientific challenge with great socioeconomic impact is to reduce the mortality of small and medium businesses and increase their productivity. In general, they are family businesses. Moreover, family conflicts have a negative impact on business, especially in the critical stages of these companies. This fact in particular is a major challenge for managers. This project bringing together researchers from the area of management and people with experience in the diagnostic and intervention in the field of small business, families and organizational culture aims to provide methods and tools to answer the question. It is believed that a better understanding of organizational culture (OC) and the dynamics of leadership teams in family businesses contribute to the solution of the problem. Therefore, the research aims to study relationships between dimensions of CO and the dynamics of leadership teams in family businesses. Furthermore, few studies include variables from different organizational dimensions (individuals, teams and culture). Thus, it is concluded by the importance of an integrative theoretical and methodological approach - the systemic one. It seems effective to understand the teams and the organization as a whole (CO). It is adopted the method of case study with qualitative and quantitative design (content analysis and descriptive statistics and t-test). The study targets four small and medium family companies located in the same region in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Research instruments are: a) Questionnaire to characterize the company and local observations; b) Structured Organizational Interview; c) Organizational Culture Scale - ECO; d) Organizational Group Scale - OGS. Beside the use of content analysis with systemic approach and the use of the NVIVO software (qualitative research), it is used an operational definition for each variable under study as well as the quantification of the results by means of scale. This procedure allows the statistical treatment of data. We hope to answer the research problem by integrating the results coming from different fields of knowledge: Management and Human Relations; from different organizational levels (individuals, teams, CO) and from different methodologies (qualitative and quantitative). We also hope to extend the validation work with the research tools and to collaborate with the organizational health and productivity of the companies. The results will be discussed in the context of systemic integration of data coming from individuals, teams, and CO, and also based on empirical studies on the topic. (AU)