Family firm’s management composition: the role played by family members’ age in TMT and supervisor levels

Family firms (FFs) are the backbone of entrepreneurial fabric in many countries. Management of such businesses is complex because of their features: the overlap between family and company, and roles played by several members of the owning family. In the paper we carry out a study regarding FFs management’s age composition, focusing on the analysis of owning family’ member’s age within such companies in reference to a sample of Polish family joint-stock companies. Our main purpose is to understand how management is faced by the owning family according to the age composition of board members. Given the important role that the owning family has played for the survival of family businesses, the paper focuses on the study of management tasks based on the analysis of two management levels: Top Management Teams (TMTs) (senior management) and first level managers or supervisor level (the executive). This study has been assumed to be cognitive-exploratory. In general, we consider that the results achieved reveal key aspects of FFs’ internal performance, responding to questions related to management. The results show the identification of a group of very young people aged 18–28 who are members of Supervisory boards. The average age of family members in Supervisory boards does not differ from the average age of family members in TMTs. The distribution of age of family members in TMTs and Supervisory boards is multimodal and can be split into Gaussian components. Different age components were found in Supervisory boards and in TMTs. The result achieved offers a more realistic and reliable view on the status of FFs, which can be very useful not only to its leaders but also to all the stakeholders related to it.