Family SME’s internationalization: Disentangling the influence of familiness on Spanish firms’ export activity

ABSTRACT This paper studies the relationships between family involvement and internationalization of family SMEs, examining the effects exerted by the three main dimensions that comprise the concept of familiness: power, experience, and culture. Disentangling the influence of familiness dimensions lead us to discover the combined effects of family’s governance, generation and culture on SMEs’ export activity The results, using the F-PEC scale over a sample of 500 Spanish firms, show that this multidimensional approach better identifies the determinants of the family SMEs’ internationalization. Specifically, we find that the family experience and its culture orientation positively affect the firm‘s export activity while family governance/management does not have any significant influence.