Leveraging strategic resources – Investigating the role of dynamic capabilities in (family) firms

The dynamic capabilities view is a central perspective in the field of strategic management that deals with the question of how firms create and sustain a competitive advantage (Teece, 2007; Teece, Pisano, & Shuen, 1997). Dynamic capabilities describe an organization's ability to adapt, integrate, and reconfigure its resources to address changing market conditions (Teece, 2007; Teece et al., 1997). However, dynamic capabilities require further investigation to gain a better understanding of antecedents, processes, and outcomes in various organizational contexts. My dissertation includes five studies: One systematic literature review, one empirical qualita-tive study, and three empirical quantitative studies. The first study of this thesis provides a holistic overview on socioemotional wealth (SEW), which plays a central role for decision making in family firms and can be an antecedent of a firm’s dynamic capabilities (Berrone, Cruz, & Gómez‐Mejia, 2012; Fitz-Koch & Nordqvist, 2017). I systematically review and dis-entangle SEW along its different dimensions according to Berrone et al. (2012) and provide comprehensive directions for further research in family firms and beyond family firm bounda-ries. One of these research avenues includes investigating the transfer of the intangible resource social capital (SC) during succession in family firms. As such, the second study of this thesis addresses this gap by qualitatively examining the trans-fer and reconfiguration of SC from a predecessor to a successor in family firms. My co-author and I thereby distinguish between intra- and non-family successions and highlight similarities and distinctions within this process between both. We reveal five phases from the time before the entrance of the successor until the phase of cultivating the SC after the predecessor’s exit, including the repercussion of the predecessor on the SC. Our findings shed light on the capa-bility to hand over and reconfigure SC in a succession event, which seems particularly relevant in light of the high number of family firms that currently face the challenge of succession in Germany (Fels, Suprinovič, Schlömer-Laufen, & Kay, 2021). The third study also focuses on family firms, but investigates whether SEW through family influence affects configuring resources towards explorative or exploitative learning. My co-author and I argue that family influence in firms fosters a risk-averse decision making environ-ment that prevents firms from allocating a high level of resources to exploration. Our empirical findings confirm our assumption and further unveil a mechanism through the appointment of a family chief executive officer (CEO) outside the founding family to mitigate the negative effect on a firm’s exploration. The fourth study of this thesis also investigates the context of allocating resources to either exploration or exploitation, but in this article my co-authors and I focus on the outcomes of a firm’s exploration orientation. We were able to replicate an inverted U-shaped relationship be-tween a firm’s relative exploration orientation and its performance in a German sample. We further show that the competition for non-scale free resources weakens the proposed relation-ship. Accordingly, lower competition for non-scale free resources can be a success factor to leverage the effect of a firm’s exploration on performance. As such, our study may provide guidance on how to overcome problems of the decline in Germany’s innovative strength and lack of skilled workforce in recent years (Naudé & Nagler, 2021). While the earlier studies focus on internal mechanisms of resource adaptation and reconfigura-tion, the fifth study of this thesis shifts attention to outcomes of dynamic capabilities in an external perspective. Together with my co-authors, I examine how stakeholders value firms’ efforts to deploy resources towards corporate social responsibility (CSR) engagement in their online-word-of-mouth (OWoM) on social media. We present empirical results that firms’ CSR communication on social media fully mediates the positive effect of a firm’s CSR engagement on its OWoM. In contrast to most previous works (e.g., Chu, Chen, & Gan, 2020), we conduct our study in a real social media setting using a large longitudinal data set. Our findings shed light on the effects of firms’ CSR engagement and communication in times of an interconnected world, in which word-of-mouth (WoM) is formed around various debates among multiple stakeholders, and CSR topics still remain of an ongoing debate (Eccles, 2022; Etter, Colleoni, Illia, Meggiorin, & D’Eugenio, 2018). Overall, based on a literature review highlighting the central role of SEW for decision making, this thesis provides several empirical studies on the role of firms’ dynamic capabilities in strategic management. By taking a process perspective on the handover and reconfiguration of the intangible resource SC during succession, studying antecedents, contextual factors, and outcomes of a firm’s explorative learning capabilities, and unveiling positive outcomes of a firm’s CSR and CSR communication capabilities on stakeholders’ perception, this thesis advances knowledge in the field of a firm’s dynamic capabilities.