Behavioural Research Lab Seminar: Doctor Alex Kevill

This Behavioural Research Lab seminar will be hosted by Doctor Alex Kevill, Lecturer in Enterprise and Entrepreneurship at Leeds University Business School. An online option is also available, if you would like to join online please contact [email protected].

Transgenerational entrepreneurship (TE) explores how entrepreneurial mindsets develop and are passed across generations. TE also stresses the foundational role that familiness – the unique configuration of family‑influenced resources and capabilities that can support entrepreneurial activity – plays in enabling the transfer of entrepreneurial mindsets from older to younger generations.
While much research has centred on the role of TE in the core family firm, we contend that a more complete understanding requires greater focus on the family unit. Furthermore, we challenge the common assumption that familiness is uniformly accessible, valued, and shared within families, and thus that it inherently functions as an enabler of TE.
Drawing on qualitative data from fourteen multi‑entrepreneur families in Mexico and guided by the cohesion and adaptability dimensions of Olson’s Circumplex Model of Marital and Family Systems, we examine how family dynamics and emotional relationality shape the enactment and transmission of entrepreneurship across generations within families. We ultimately illuminate why some families mobilise familiness more effectively than others to foster entrepreneurial mindset transferal.
Our findings uncover five familiness regimes, each characterised by distinct emotional patterns that shape interaction, resource sharing, and opportunity development. These regimes clarify why familiness can be generative, restrictive, fragmented, or absent, ultimately showing that familiness can be a double-edged sword within TE. We also extend TE by theorising multidirectional mindset transfer – downward, upward, lateral, and reciprocal – showing that its form and intensity are driven by family dynamics rather than generational order. We also expand TE outcomes beyond firm continuity to include diversification, individual venturing, specialisation, leveraging, and wealth preservation. These contributions converge to offer a family‑system perspective that explains heterogeneity in entrepreneurial pathways and illuminates how relational configurations and emotional dynamics shape the emergence and limits of transgenerational entrepreneurship.

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