An Empirical Study Of The Governance Structure Evolution In Family Firms

Property rights, management and controlling rights are the the core content of the corporate governance, previous literatures which study on the governance structure of family business focused on cultural perspective and agency cost perspective, so this paper proposed to study property, management and controlling rights of the family firms on the life-cycle perspective. This paper tries to describe a complete and clear picture of two rights'trends, and explain them with transaction cost theory. In this paper, we have interviews with six family firms, which located in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai, and make integrated use of typical case studies and more cases one by one copy study to do exploratory research.This article answered two questions raised in the period of literature review. We found out that family firms'property present dispersion in start-up stage; and property become more and more concentrated in grow-up stage; then it gradually dispersed from the high degree of centralization in mature stage.Management and controlling rights shows a certain degree of dispersion in start-up stage; and concentrates in grow-up stage; then it distribute to the professional managers.What's more, three fingdings were proposed. Firstly, family firms' self-awarenesses of the firms Standardization reduce with the evolution of their life-cycles. Secondly, family firm accept to disperse their property in stock market rather than outside shareholder in mature stage. Finally, employee engagement gradually improved with the evolution of firms'life-cycle.