Research On The Impact Of Dual Performance Feedback On The Ambidextrous Innovation Of Family Businesses

With the acceleration of China’s economic transformation and the increasingly fierce global competition,Chinese family businesses have entered a critical transition period from factor-driven to innovation-driven,and it is urgent to realize the transformation and upgrading of family businesses through innovation.Therefore,how to carry out appropriate innovation activities in family businesses has become a key practical issue that needs to be resolved urgently.Looking at the current mainstream research,it is found that although there is a lot of research on family business innovation,the current research ignores the different types of family business innovation activities.Therefore,deconstructing family business innovation is the key breakthrough point to promote current family business innovation research.After reviewing the literature,this article believes that it is reasonable and necessary to cut in from the perspective of exploratory innovation and exploitative innovation,and that the current ambidextrous innovation research of family businesses is in its infancy,and there is a lack discussion on the basis of decision-making at the enterprise level.The performance feedback is a key enterprise-level factor that affects the risky decision-making of family businesses,but it still needs to be further deepened and refined..Closely focusing on the above-mentioned reality and the gaps in current research,this paper raises the core research question: How does the performance feedback and expectation of family businesses affect their ambidextrous innovation decision-making? Specifically,this article will conduct research from the following key research questions:(1)How will the combined effect of the family business’ s history and future performance feedback affect the decision-making of its ambidextrous innovation activities?(2)What kind of moderating role will family involvement play in the relationship between the dual performance feedback and the ambidextrous innovation in family businesses?(3)What kind of moderating role will institutional investors play in the relationship between the dual performance feedback and the ambidextrous innovation in family businesses?(4)How will the ambidextrous innovation activities in family business affect its business performance? Based on the summary of existing research,this research believes that the corporate behavior theory and prospect theory should be introduced to explain the ambidextrous innovation behavior in family businesses together with the social emotional wealth theory to meet the relatively complex decision-making situation in family businesses.After completing the theoretical model and hypothetical reasoning,this article selects Chinese Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed family businesses from 2008 to 2019 as the research object,and uses Poisson pseudo-likelihood regression with multiple levels of fixed effects to empirically test the relationship between the performance feedback and the ambidextrous innovation in family businesses.The findings of this study are as follows:(1)The dual positive performance feedback promotes the exploitative innovation in family businesses;the dual negative performance feedback promotes the exploratory innovation in family businesses;the combined effect of the positive historical performance feedback and the negative future performance expectation promotes exploration innovation in family business;the combined effect of the negative historical performance feedback and the positive future performance expectation promotes the exploitative innovation in family business.(2)Family involvement and institutional ownership mediate the relationship between the joint effect of historical and future performance feedback and the ambidextrous innovation activities in family businesses.(3)Exploitative innovation has an obvious promotion effect on both the short-term and long-term performance of family businesses,but exploratory innovation is helpful to reduce the bankruptcy threat of enterprises.Taking the family business as the research object,this paper analyzes the decision-making basis of ambidextrous innovation in family business at the enterprise level-the gap of dual performance feedback,and also discusses the boundary conditions and performance consequences of this relationship.The innovation points and research contributions are mainly:(1)This study establishes an adaptive model for family businesses to dynamically adjust ambidextrous innovation activities,which makes up for the limitations the family business innovation as a whole in the previous research,and makes contributions to the research of family business innovation by paying attention to differential innovation behavior.(2)This study extends the application of performance feedback in the research of family business innovation.By introducing social emotional wealth theory into the research framework of corporate behavior theory,this paper improves the applicability and explanatory power of corporate behavior theory to family business behavior.(3)This study incorporates the key decision-making entities(family members and institutional investors)in the family business into this research framework defines the boundary conditions for the family business’ s response to the dual performance feedback,and reveals how stakeholders affect the family businesses’ cognition of the dual performance feedback and the ambidextrous innovation response strategy.It also enriches the existing research on enterprise innovation search under the dual performance feedback.(4)Finally,this study provides empirical evidence for the relationship between “ambidextrous innovation and corporate performance”in the context of family business,which has certain guiding significance for the innovation practice of Chinese family businesses during the transition period.