The project, which was set up jointly by the Institute of Management Control & Consulting and the Department of Corporate Finance, is being financially supported as part of the Business School's first High Impact Research Call. Prof. Birgit Feldbauer-Durstmüller and Prof. Helmut Pernsteiner are the project leaders. In addition to the two JKU departments, Prof. Martin Hiebl from the University of Siegen and Prof. Andreas Hack from the University of Bern are project partners. Dr. Tanja Wolf and Prof. Stefan Mayr from the Institute of Management Control & Consulting and Prof. Eva Wagner, Prof. Markus Dick and Dr. Thomas Brunner-Kirchmair from the Department of Corporate Finance are the project members. Johannes Thaller as doctoral candidate completes the project team.

Primary goals of this project are:

1. Scrutinizing the religious and secular sources and origins of values in family firms.
2. Analyzing how specific religious (Christian or Muslim) and secular beliefs influence values in family firms.
3. Investigating how religious values and beliefs affect selected managerial decisions such as mergers and acquisitions (M&A), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), crisis management and management control choices.

In this project, we aim to develop a closer understanding of the influence of religious (Christian or Muslim) and secular values on family firms (FFs) and their managerial decisions. Managerial decisions of family firms are shaped by their unique emphasis on socio-emotional wealth, i.e. distinct non-financial aspects or goals that meet the owner family’s affective needs. We focus on selected influential managerial decisions including corporate social responsibility engagements, mergers and acquisitions activities, crisis management and management control choices. Religious and secular values can be expected to either attenuate or reinforce the impact of socioemotional wealth on these managerial decisions.

This project can therefore shed light on how religious and secular values shift families’ reference points and thus influence decision-making. To do so, we want to draw on interviews with members of owner families from the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) due to its homogenous cultural background. We envisage that this project not only allows for novel insights into the under-researched question of how religion shapes managerial decisions of family firms, but also for the identification of configurations of such values and managerial choices that promise a more effective management of FFs.