Governance structures in Italian family SMEs

This chapter offers a comparative study of family versus non-family small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs) in terms of ownership and governance issues, and is based on a survey on 620 incorporated companies of small and medium size. The survey was started in 2000 and was aimed at making an in-depth exploration of Italian small and medium-sized enterprises, with a special focus on family firms. Previous surveys had already analysed family small and medium-sized enterprises in Italy (Corbetta and Montemerlo, 1999); this survey intended to update some information and to go deeper into some issues, particularly into ownership and governance in terms of both structure and evolution. Another goal of the survey was to make some preliminary tests of different theoretical perspectives. On one side, we wanted to verify whether agency theory assumptions may apply to small and medium-sized enterprises and not only to large corporations; on the other side, we maintain that agency is a relevant perspective by to interpret family small and medium-sized enterprises, but that it is not sufficient and should be integrated with a relational perspective. The main findings we obtained confirmed, even at an exploratory level, that both perspectives are relevant. Family small and medium-sized enterprises are becoming more complex, especially in terms of ownership,which is increasingly fragmented. Fragmentation typically brings about differentiation between managing and non-managing owners, which raises a number of critical topics to be coped with to prevent agency problems, such as shares’ transfers, dividends, appointment criteria for future leaders, company control through governance bodies. Family small and medium-sized enterprises do appear to cope with such topics by sharing rules for ownership and leadership, and by articulating governance systems. But this is not enough to retain ownership unity, which explains why, in a relational perspective, unofficial governance bodies such as family councils are used to nurture trust and shared vision. First, we present the main theoretical references and the propositions that have been derived fromboth the agency and the relational perspectives. Then,we illustrate the methods, sample and data collection. The next section reports main findings. Finally, we discuss such findings, offering some concluding remarks to researchers and owning families.

Questo capitolo offre un'analisi comparativa tra imprese familiari e non di piccola e media dimensione in termini di proprietà e strutture di governance.