Commitment Escalation to a Failing Family Business

The overarching intent of this manuscript is to heighten awareness to the concept of commitment escalation as it bears on a failing family business. Specifically, drawing on the concept of emotional ownership, together with self-justification arguments, we a) identify factors considered to be most forceful in contributing to the presence of commitment escalation and thus, resistance to change in a failing family business (i.e., emotional ownership, feeling of responsibility, investment of capital, temporal distance from the founder’s business, individualism/collectivism), and b) model these related factors in a form that can serve heuristically to stimulate future empirical research capable of testing for the construct validity of commitment escalation in a family business context. We present potential items that may be useful for future scholars in measuring our constructs of interest as they relate to a failing family business.