Leadership Practices in Family Owned Businesses

Aronoff and Ward (1991, p. 1) held that "more than 95 percent of all businesses in the United States are family owned." Dumas (1992, p. 41) placed the level at "more than 90 percent." Dumas (1992, p. 41) added that these familyowned firms "account for about one half of all the country's jobs and a significant percentage (about 40%) of the gross national product." While familyowned business firms are found on the "Fortune 500" list of the largest companies in the country, the statistics cited by Aronoff and Ward (1991, p. 1) and Dumas (1992, p. 41) indicate that the classification of familyowned businesses is strikingly parallel to the small business classification in the United States.

The 1980 White House Conference on Small Business defined a smallbusiness as one with 500 or fewer employees (United States Small Business Administration, 1980, p. 3). This definition covers almost all business enterprises in the United States99.7 percentin 1993 (United States Small Business Administration, 1994, p. 14). Business enterprises included in this definition accounted for 47.8 percent of nongovernment and nonfarm employment, 42 percent of sales revenues, and 38 percent of the country's gross national product. These proportions

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enerally called consistency theories, investigators have attempted to discover the relationships among beliefs, feelings, and behavioral tendencies. Chief among these consistency theories is the theory of cognitive dissonance. According to this theory, inconsistency between cognitive elementsbeliefs, attitudes, and so forth leads to dissonance. This dissonance, in turn, leads an individual to change one or more cognitive elements, in an attempt to eliminate the unpleasant state. The nuclear family is a major influence on the development and formation of values by an individual in early life (Parish and Nunn, 1988, pp. 519521). Religion also exerts a significant influence on the development and formation of schemarelevant values (Lau, 1989, pp. 137156). Highly religious individuals, as opposed to other individuals, tend to place a strong emphasis on moral and relational values, and a lesser interest on personalextrinsic, competency, and egoistic values. This difference does not indicate an absence of one type of value in highly religious or less religious individuals. Rather, it indicates a tendency to emphasize certain value types. Social factors also influence value development and formation (Mueller, 1991, p. 86).
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Approximate Pages = 38 (250 words per page)

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