The role of corporate governance in the development of strategy execution in family firms.

In recent years, strategy execution has been the focus of growing interest involving both scholars and practitioners. Several surveys showed that top executives identify effective strategy execution to be the most crucial and challenging issue they are faced with (for example, Sull et al. 2015). The growing evidence that strategy execution is a key element in under- standing why some firms perform better than others has driven the need to undertake new avenues of research to advance our theoretical understanding of the emerging construct of strategy execution (Albuquerque de Oliveira et al. 2019). Scholars first investigated factors leading to successful strategy execu- tion and integrated them into a framework of causal links to develop principles for guiding strategy execution (Burgelman and Grove 2007; Davis et al. 2009; Miller 1997). However, a systematic and comprehensive body of literature is still a long way from being achieved. Research to date has largely neglected the link between strategy execution and corporate governance, although it has a significant influence on the strategy process and the running of the business (Schmidt and Brauer 2006). The theoretical gap in understanding the interplay between strategy execution and corporate governance is especially relevant in family business research owing to the acknowledged institutional overlap between family, business and management, and its pervasive effect on the running of the business (Sharma 2004). Thus, it leaves significant weaknesses for understanding differences in family firms’ behavior (Chrisman et al. 2007; Zellweger et al. 2010) and how these differences impact on business performance (Chua et al. 2005). This research was carried out using a single case-study approach and investigates how and why corporate governance in family firms influences strategy execution. Drawing on recent literature on entrepreneurship in family firms and behavioral perspectives on corporate governance, the study focuses on how the actors and processes of family governance enable the creation of effective organizational capability for strategy execution. Findings show that governance actors, their behaviors, how they interact and the processes they put into practice, as well as the relationships of inter- dependence, can configure a mechanism that facilitates the development of organizational capabilities for effective strategy execution. The results show that the distinctive behavior of family members and their action through family governance exerts a fundamental influence on strategy execution. In this perspective, the interaction of family governance with strategy execution helps to explain the differences and distinctiveness of family firms’ performance.