Our research group (Sarah Pieslinger, Johannes Thaller, Tanja Wolf, Birgit Feldbauer-Durstmüller) presented initial results from their project "Influence of Religious Values of Leaders on Leadership and Entrepreneurship in Family Businesses" during a symposium at the Academy of Management organized by our research partner, Ksenia Keplinger, from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.

Abstract:

One of the concerns in modern organizations is ethics, where few institutions are unaffected by scandals or abuse of power. Thus, we look for inspiration in difficult times to offer leaders and managers strategies to mitigate or prevent ethical challenges. This symposium brings together various values-driven leadership approaches to managing organizations and offers both historical and modern leadership lessons. All of the papers stem from organizations rooted in religious values that perform entrepreneurial actions to survive, yet the organizations exist in diverse contexts. Two of the papers investigate leadership and power in Benedictine organizations that have a long-standing history in values-driven leadership and offer ideas how to implement the elements of authentic, ethical, and servant leadership over time. The other two papers study the influence of religious values on entrepreneurial actions in general and in the family business context in particular. We weave the four papers together to better understand how leaders and entrepreneurs incorporate their (religious) values into their leadership styles and adapt their management approaches to engage their stakeholders. Finally, we discuss practical implications of our findings in this symposium.

The study of our research group investigates the influence of religious values on entrepreneurial actions in the family business context. It is based on a systematic literature review that investigates the understanding of the concept of religious values across 160 published studies. Furthermore, this research evaluates the influence of religious values of family members on leadership and entrepreneurship of family businesses. The initial results suggest that religious values of individuals impact goals and values of a family business as a whole, as well as positively influence the behavior of family business members in morally challenging situations.