Family CEO and company performance during the COVID-19 crisis: The case of Cameroon

Abstract

This study analyses the resilience of family businesses in a developing country like Cameroon during the covid-19 crisis by applying measures of association, regression analysis, and comparison tests to data collected by administering a questionnaire on a panel of 280 companies of which 196 are family businesses and 84 non-family businesses. The results show that throughout the pandemic period, family companies are more resilient in terms of financial and social performance relative to non-family businesses. We also find that among family businesses, the most successful are those with a family member as CEO or those whose management is dominated by the family controlling the firm. The results extend former research by showing that family leadership is a form of management that can provide responses to unexpected events that affect the company. and social performance which are standardized on a scale ranging from 0 to 100. We are thus interested in the variations of these criteria and not in their absolute values. The psychometric p ope tie of thi cale a ea edu ing onbach’ alpha of 0.881 and 0.74 respectively for the financial and social dimensions. Subjective measurements of performance are used for two reasons. First of all, this study explores the consequences of COVID-19. Therefore it would otherwise be necessary to use the annual reports of 2020, which are not available at the time of developing this study (they will be available from June 2021 at the earliest). Also, the Cameroonian SMEs included in this study are not listed on the stock exchange, the financial and accounting information which they communicate in their annual reports have a limited degree of reliability or are not even available. It can thus use only subjective measurements to analyse their performance.