مدیریت تضاد در کسب و کار خانوادگی: یک تجزیه و تحلیل کتابشناختی و مرور مطالعاتی اصولی Conflict management in family businesses: A bibliometric analysis and systematic literature review

1. Introduction Conflicts in family businesses are viewed as detrimental to the life cycle of the firm. Indeed, family firms tend to suffer from issues relating to nepotism, co-opting family members with inadequate experience and skill into the management team; infighting, triggered by a wide variety of causes, including the personal relationship conflicts within the family; overriding ambition to stay in control by the family members; and conflicts arising between family and non-family managers/employees (Corbetta and Salvato, 2012). Despite the prevalence of such problems, these issues seem to be widely under researched, with the exception of a few studies (Sorenson, 1999; Kellermanns and Eddleston, 2004, 2007). This is further confirmed by the most comprehensive bibliometric analysis on the whole field of family business which states that “although conflict is a core area of concern, we know surprisingly little about it and even less about conflict management in family businesses” (Xi et al., 2015, p. 123). Thus, the two fields seem not to reciprocally build on each other’s knowledge and advancements. Indeed, we know quite a lot about conflicts and conflict management in a number of environments; however, research from conflict management scholars, which specifically addresses conflict from a family firms’ context, is scarce. Similarly, family business research has widely acknowledged the existence and the importance of conflicts in family businesses; however, this is without a clear underpinning in the vast theoretical contributions from the conflict management field (Hermann et al., 2011). Stemming from this gap, this paper intends to propose a bibliometric investigation and systematic literature review of the topic of conflict in family businesses, exposing the possible links and research avenues and proposing a collection and arrangement of the main existing literature on these topics. The paper also proposes a research agenda to identify issues and research gaps that should be explored by researchers to reach a more mature literature on conflict management in family businesses. Thus, we propose a bibliometric study that covers the years from 1985 to 2015.  management (Podsakoff et al., 2008), entrepreneurship (Landström et al., 2012; Laudano et al., 2018), operations management (Chen and Hsu, 2009; Zhu et al., 2015) and innovation (Fagerberg et al., 2012; Appio et al., 2016; Marzi et al., 2017) by helping scholars to sort the streams of research from the “tangled forest” of scientific proliferation. Following Brown and Eisenhardt (1995) and Furrer et al. (2008), this paper aims to help scholars to better understand the direction in which the field is going and where the gaps are, thus providing a guideline for scholars in positioning their future research focussing on two questions. First, who has published the most influential literature about conflict in family firms and what was their contribution to the evolution of the field? Second, what is the content and the association between topics of conflict in family firms?