Parenting Among Business Groups: An Emerging Market’s Perspective

Emerging markets witness a significant overlap between social communities, families and business activities. This paper attempts to decipher a source of heterogeneity, which is business group affiliation among family firms. This paper details the reasons why business group affiliation is beneficial in an emerging market by employing the concept of parenting to reconcile the potential deficiencies of business group affiliation pointed out by various strategy scholars. We use two proxies to measure the extent of parenting namely, firm leadership by a family member and promoting family’s shareholding in the group affiliate company. The study has been conducted in the Indian economic context using a dataset consisting of 3,728 listed companies. Results show that superior parenting realized by professional firm leadership and higher promoter shareholding leads to superior financial performance among family business group firms.