What is the text saying in a long summary? Discussion
In this article, we theorized and tested the effects of the
involvement of young adolescents in their family business on adolescents’ relationship with parents and adolescents’ psychological well-being. If adolescents work
at the business, parents can not only spend more time
with them but also play a more central role in their general professional training, development, and professional mentorship. To understand the consequences for
adolescents, we drew on research findings from the family business literature and the family studies literature
and used longitudinal data that allowed us to compare
these adolescents with their peers who have other types
of work engagements.
The decision-making process of parents as owners
and managers of family firms is influenced by their
intention and preference in keeping family legacy
(Hammond et al., 2016). Whether, these families have
biological, material, or even social legacy orientation,
through hiring, parents are able to spend more time with
their children and offer their adolescents relatively
attractive jobs and personal growth opportunities, and
are also able to spend more time with their children.
Working with and for relatives is a rather unique experience compared with working for strangers. It gives
unique experiences to adolescents who work in their
family firms compared with their peers who work elsewhere in such a way that those who work in their family
firms have better relationships with their parents and
have better psychological well-being.
Using the rich longitudinal NLSCY data allowed us
to investigate these effects over time. This data set limited us in finding information on the extent to which
adolescents spend time with their parents at work or
whether adolescents are exposed to a unique work environment when working for their family firms. As such, we were not able to directly test these mechanisms
beyond the proxy measure we include. However, the
comprehensive sampling and weighting scheme allows
us to generalize findings of an improved relationship
with parents and better psychological well-being to a
broad population. This data limitation does provide a
good opportunity for future research using a different
data strategy to more explicitly examine the multilevel
work implications implied by the ecological theory of
human development. The theory suggests the family
business context should be different, and our findings
show support for this. Building on these findings, it
would be natural to examine a wide variety of interactions of these systems to better understand the overall
dynamic of interactions of the multiple layers to analyze
the broader system-level questions.
While one of the unique strengths of this study is that
we compared these effects between those adolescents
who work in their family firms on a year-round basis
against all other adolescents, we also explored the possibility of whether the effects were different across a
number of identified risk sets. The risk sets allowed us to
combat the challenges of selecting on the dependent
variable, as would be common in a study solely of adolescents working in family firms, and compare the
effects across all of those adolescents who have the
potential to work in their family firms if they choose to
do so.
The empirical results of this study from the analysis
of the full population as well as the risk sets yield two
interesting and in some ways unexpected discoveries.
The first one is that the improved relationship with parents involves both fathers and mothers. While due to the
archival data structure, we cannot tease out which parent
is involved in the family business, our analysis provides
evidence that the improved relationship between those
adolescents who work in their family firm and their parents applies to both parents. We constructed two latent
variables corresponding to relationship with mother and
relationship with father. We also created a broader construct of relationship with parents, presented in our
tables, which combines both parents. Our findings are
robust across these analyses and provide support for the
positive impact of adolescents working in their family
firm on their relationship with their parents. This may
stem from the fact that those adolescents who work in
their family firm gain a deeper understanding of the
financial situation of their families and through their
year-round involvement directly contribute to it,
regardless of which parent works in the business. Their
involvement coupled with spending time with parental
figures working in the business foster a positive relationship between the adolescents and parents.
We also found that generally speaking, the benefits of
working in a family firm are best obtained through yearround involvement in the family firm as opposed to partial involvement. The only exception is that the
immediate effect of working in the family firm on selfesteem is not dependent on the level and continuity of
involvement of adolescents in the business and even
partial involvement could lead to positive effects on
self-esteem, although the finding is marginally statistically significant. However, the same effect is not true in
the long term for both self-esteem and depression. In
this case, those adolescents who have year-round
involvement in the family firm (i.e., throughout summer
and school year) benefit the most in terms of their psychological well-being in the longer run (i.e., 2 years
later) than all other adolescents including those who
work partially in their family firm.
By exploring the positive impact of the involvement
of adolescents in the family firm on adolescents’ relationship with their parents and the adolescent’s psychological well-being, the contributions of this study are
twofold. First, we directly respond to calls of family
business scholars to employ longitudinal data and draw
on representative samples (Sharma, 2004; Sharma,
Chrisman, & Gersick, 2012) and also to make a direct
comparison between working for family firms versus
nonfamily firms (Chrisman, Chua, & Sharma, 2005).
We, further, have focused our attention on an understudied phenomenon in the family business literature—adolescents, who are a significant source of potential human
capital and successors of the business. Adolescents’
relationship with parents and their psychological wellbeing could have significant impact on how family and
family firms carry their legacy forward. Our findings
start to answer the recent call of Jaskiewicz and Dyer
(2017) to study family heterogeneities. Our work
directly addresses one of the four categories they raise—
family interactions. That said, the simplified parental
relationship measures our data were limited to are an
opportunity for future research to further disentangle
alternative family structures and relationships and
answer the rest of their call to study broader family heterogeneities beyond family interactions. The various
other types of heterogeneities raised in their essay suggest that differences on family structure, family functional roles, and family events may also affect the
dynamics we observed.
Second, we contribute to the family studies literature by theoretically differentiating the family firm
adolescent work experience from working for a
stranger. While the field of family studies has greatly
shaped public policies regarding child labor, theoretically it has not made an explicit differentiation and
empirically tested such differences among an array of
various types of work. Previous literature had assumed
that adolescent work experience pulls children away
from parents, yet when working in a family firm many
times the opposite is true. It appears that working for a
family firm is a critical type of unobserved heterogeneity regarding the construct of “high-quality” work
experience proposed by Mortimer et al. (2016) during
these critical developmental years. Our findings suggest that future studies in this field should include and
control for the important variable of the nature of family relationship to the employer. In other words, the
family business context needs to be brought in and
accounted for as it can provide strong positives for
adolescent development. For example, one study found
that adolescents’ relationship with parents were more
positive for those adolescents situated in rural settings
than those in urban settings (Shanahan, Elder,
Burchinal, & Conger, 1996). However, in our data, we
observed that there is a higher chance for adolescents
living in a rural setting to be working in their family
firm than in an urban setting. We consequently argue
that the positive parent–child effect found in the rural
setting could potentially be explained by our theory.
Adolescents in rural settings are more likely to work in
their family business and those who work in their family business tend to have better relationships with parents. Therefore, we expect to see that among those
adolescents working, those in rural areas have a better
relationship with their parents. By highlighting this
important difference between working for family versus working for strangers, this article offers alternative
explanations based on the nature of work for previously observed results concerning adolescent work
more broadly where details about the familial relationship with the employer are unavailable. Future work in
the ecological theory of human development needs to
address the specific work quality differences working
in a family business creates for the adolescent and family relationships more broadly.
While we acknowledge that the better psychological
outcomes that are found in adolescents who work in
their family firms are desirable, an important implication for such adolescents is the lifelong impact of the
enhanced relationship with their parents. Prior research
findings suggest the satisfaction with a mentoring relationship can have profound influence on individuals
(Ragins, Cotton, & Miller, 2000) and a common source
of mentorship for children is their parents. In the past
few decades, however, the nature of parent–child relationships has changed and they tend to spend less time
with each other. For example, as Putnam (2000) noted,
between 1976 and 1997, according to Roper polls of
families with children aged 8 to 17, vacationing together
fell from 53 percent to 38 percent, watching TV together
from 54 percent to 41 percent, attending religious services
together from 38 percent to 31 percent, and “just sitting and
talking” together from 53 percent to 43 percent. (p. 101)
The decrease in the interaction between parents and
children may affect family ties and adolescent behaviors
over the full life course. Children suffer in their performance due to the lack of parental involvement in their
affairs (Astone & McLanahan, 1991).
In family firms not spending enough time with children, or not having them involved in the business, can
have more severe consequences than the classical work–
family conflict. Young family members may lose the
motivation to become involved in the family firm
(Aldrich & Cliff, 2003), or the competitive advantage of
family firms may suffer due to the possible decline in
family social capital (Arregle et al., 2007). Shrinkage of
family size also implies fewer options available among
family members as the potential successor to the business. Evidently, adolescents working in their family firm
have many long-term advantages. Not only may the
children adopt the entrepreneurial spirit from their parents (White, Thornhill, & Hampson, 2007), and associate an identity to the business (Shepherd & Haynie,
2009), but also as this study unearthed, hiring adolescents into their family firms enables adolescents with a
greater sense of psychological well-being and improves
their relationship with their parents setting them up for
different life paths.
Prior research suggests that other people in an individual’s network have a great influence in shaping individual careers (Bosley, Arnold, & Cohen, 2009), and in
many instances, individuals turn to their family members to make career decisions (Whiston & Keller, 2004). But
what happens when parents and children become colleagues? What happens when family, which plays an
important part in the “life course” of individual work
(Erickson, Martinengo, & Hill, 2010), becomes a central
component of one’s life such in multiple domains such as
work and home? Do individuals who work alongside a
relative exhibit different career choices than their peers?
This article has attempted to open the conversation about
these important questions and calls for future research to
consider the consequences of heterogeneous work experiences in the family business on career outcomes.
Managerial Implications
Spending more time with adolescents at work implies
parents having a greater control over their family and
work responsibilities. This perceived control in return
can provide parents with more calmness and less work–
life conflict (Williams & Alliger, 1994). It is surprising
that many family business consultants advise against the
next generation becoming involved in their parents’
business in their early professional years. An advisor
explains this point:
gaining some work experience outside the business first
[is] a great opportunity for the children to prove themselves,
make mistakes in someone else’s backyard, and ensure that
they are bringing something to the party . . . and outside
work experience boosts self-esteem. (Karofsky, 2005)
While this advice may be applicable in some situations
for adults in their 20s, 30s, or even 40s, we previously
knew very little about the effect of work in the family
business during adolescence. Our findings clearly demonstrate working in a family firm during adolescence
raises one’s general psychological well-being. This
common advisor advice also ignores another important
factor—that is, the relationship with parents. Without
relying on empirical evidence, many family business
owners and consultants believe that children should be
urged to work elsewhere before entering into family
firms to gain self-esteem and establish credibility (Ward,
2004). In this study, we take a systematic look at the
impact working in their family firms has on adolescents’
psychological well-being and relationships with their
parents, and find evidence contradicting common practice recommendations which have been made without
any empirical guidance.
This study can serve as an important empirical source
to inform choices by parents in family firms as well as
family business advisors regarding adolescents working
in the business. It specifically speaks to those families
who wish to create successful legacies. Our results suggest parents should give serious thought into hiring their
adolescents into their family firm and offering them
challenging and interesting projects to aid in their development, while simultaneously suggesting that all adolescents should strive to identify attractive high-quality
work experience, such as working in their family business, during their formative years to build the psychological foundation for positive lifelong trajectories.
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