This study focuses on a particular form of family businesses—businesses with at
least two unrelated founding families—and how their organizational form of a
multifamily business persists over several generations. Using an inductive
approach to study five multifamily cases, we discovered that these firms did not
meet complexity with complex structures and processes. Instead, four cases
developed and utilized simple rules imprinted by the founders and pulled through
to current generations, enabling effective mutual monitoring and persistence of
the multifamily organizational form. The lack of simple rules development is
associated with one multifamily business to abandon this organizational
form.
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