What Time May Tell: An Exploratory Study of the Relationship Between Religiosity, Temporal Orientation, and Goals in Family Business

To study how religiosity affects family business goals, we merge literatures on goal setting, temporal orientation, and family business to argue that family business goals can be distinguished into short-term and long-term orientations and propose that religiosity affects both orientations, but to varying degrees. Drawing on a sample of private U.S. family businesses and applying partial least squares structural equations modeling, we find tentative support that religiosity has a stronger positive effect on long-term goal orientation than on short-term goal orientation. We discuss implications for theory development and future research involving religiosity and family business goals.