Stephan Stubner, W. Henning Blarr, Christian Brands, Torsten Wulf

• In our paper, we introduce the concept of organizational ambidexterity (OA) to family firm research and develop hypotheses regarding the impact family influence has on OA and on subsequent firm performance. We argue that as family influence increases family firms achieve higher degrees of OA and firm performance. We empirically test our hypotheses on a dataset of 104 family firms and show that family influence leads to higher degrees of ambidexterity especially through family power and cultural alignment between family and firm interests. Furthermore, we show that higher levels of OA in family firms also result in better financial performance. We contribute to family firm research by introducing organizational ambidexterity into the discussion about family firm performance and family firm heterogeneity, and thus provide an approach for integrating strategy and family firm research.