Title: Preferential hiring of relatives and family SMEs' internationalisation

Authors: Pablo Doucet; Ignacio Requejo; Isabel Suárez-González

Addresses: Business Administration Department and IME, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Castile and León, Spain ' Family Business Centre and IME, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Castile and León, Spain ' Business Administration Department and IME, University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Castile and León, Spain

Abstract: A well-established argument in the family business literature is that the pursuit of non-economic goals has a remarkable impact on family firms' strategic decisions, and particularly on their international expansion intentions. But scant research explores how family goals affect family firms' internationalisation. Using survey and archival data on a sample of 1201 Spanish family SMEs, we show that altruism-induced preferences - as captured by the adoption of the Preferential Hiring of Relatives (PHR) as a primary goal - significantly reduces foreign sales intensity and limits family business operations to their local regions. Furthermore, we find that the external threat of local unemployment exacerbates the negative effect of selecting PHR as a priority on export intensity. Our findings extend previous research on the internationalisation of family firms by highlighting the potentially adverse consequences of prioritising non-economic goals and how the firm's environment may interact with such goals to accentuate or impede SMEs' internationalisation.

Keywords: family SMEs; internationalisation; family goals; altruism; export intensity.

DOI: 10.1504/EJIM.2026.155270

European Journal of International Management, 2026 Vol.29 No.4, pp.637 - 662

Received: 09 Mar 2021
Accepted: 28 Jul 2021
Published online: 30 Jul 2026 *

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