Back to square one: The measurement of Socioemotional Wealth (SEW)

Abstract

Whilst Socioemotional Wealth (SEW) has been acknowledged in a vast amount of family firm literature, most papers continue to treat this construct at the theoretical level, while assuming that all family firms possess SEW and strive to preserve it. However, family firms are highly heterogeneous and it is therefore possible that there is much variance in SEW across these organisations. Using a large sample of family firms from Spain, the original FIBER scale proposed by Berrone et al. (2012) is validated with items that were inferentially drawn from a literature review, and we compared our results with those of Hauck et al. (2016) in Austria/Germany and those of Filser et al. (2018) in Finland. We reduced the original five dimension FIBER model to three dimensions, namely identification of family members with the firm, emotional attachment, and renewal of family bonds through intrafamily succession.