The role of socioemotional wealth and entrepreneurial orientation in family-managed hotels

Abstract The hospitality industry is dominated by small- and medium-sized hotels that are often owned and managed by families. As a result, a number of scholars have called for a better understanding of the role that family values play in the successful operation of family-managed hotels. A family's socioemotional wealth (SEW)—the amalgamation of various family values—has received considerable attention in the recent literature. In this paper we seek to advance the understanding of family-managed hospitality firms by applying the SEW construct from the entrepreneurship domain, and hypothesize that different components of family SEW distinctively impact hotel performance. We further argue that the negative impact of certain family values is mitigated for hotels that are entrepreneurially oriented. Our findings, based on primary data collected from key functionaries of 334 small hotels in India, empirically validates our theoretical model, and indicates that an appropriate configuration of family SEW components, along with an entrepreneurial orientation (EO), facilitates superior firm performance.