Family involvement, internationalisation and performance: An empirical study of the Spanish hotel industry

The hotel industry includes a very large number of family enterprises. Hence the importance of studying the characteristics of such firms and their relationship with company decisions. Since the hotel industry can be considered highly globalised, the aim of this paper is to find how the degree of internationalisation (DOI) of family firms (FFs) influences their results. Concretely, this study empirically tests a model which brings together the following three issues for the Spanish hotel industry: family involvement, DOI and performance. Drawing on a sample of 76 internationalised Spanish hotel chains, we applied a component-based structural equation modelling (partial least squared-PLS). Our results show that internationalisation is a determining factor for the performance of Spanish hotel FFs. In our model, DOI is considered a mediating variable, and our findings suggest that a greater level of family involvement in the firm positively correlates with performance.