Leadership Practices in Family Owned Businesses Ref: Rugchart revision. The original ver

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 indicate that s

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valuated in the context of one's basic beliefs. If these basic beliefs are unrealistic or irrational, one's expectancies will likely also tend to be unrealistic and irrational. One's values and attitudes are conveyed to other persons through the process of communication (Cohen, 1987, p. 57). Communication is defined as the process linking discontinuous living entities with one another (Poffenberger, 1992, p. 204). Communication is made possible by the combined effects of perception, evaluation, and expression. The social process of interpersonal communication involves three sets of determinants, which are grouped as sensory, environmental, and psychological (Poffenberger, 1992, p. 208). Sensory determinants can both physically impede communication, and induce psychological factors which impinge on effective communications. Environmental determinants are the people and the social systems with which an individual is associated, while psychological determinants are the ways in which an individual's experiences affects her or his knowledge, skills, and methods of adaptation. A person is an individual behavioral system, which, in turn, is a component of a larger social group behavioral system (Cohen, 1987, p. 71). F
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3663
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)