Validation of a Measuring Instrument for the Relationship between Knowledge Transfer and Entrepreneurial Orientation in Family Firms

Family businesses are created due to the entrepreneurial behavior of one or more founders, who find and exploit one opportunity. It is necessary that this Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) is transmitted to the next generation. We argue that knowledge management within the family business is positively related to entrepreneurial orientation and, therefore, related to firm performance. A scale for measuring the knowledge transfer has been defined in order to determine the degree of relationship between the above elements. The measuring instrument is original because previous measuring scales do not exist in the literature which measure, on the one hand, the subconstructs that might lead knowledge transfer and, on the other hand, the relationship between this and the other variables. As a result of causal relationship analysis, it concludes with a scale, with a sample of Spanish family firms, and it is the first empirical validation of these dimensions we know so far