JOURACA_SP_2017

Human Resource Activities in
Franchise and Family Business
Emma Fairbanks
Organizational structure and its relationship
to strategy and performance is a wellstudied
topic in management. However,
most research has considered large, multidivisional
organizations or complex organizational
forms such as a matrix organization.
The purpose of this research is to gain
an understanding of how different business
structures in one industry, restaurants, use
their organizational form, their human resource
policies, and the effectiveness of
these policies when compared to those of
other business structures. We study three
ideal types of restaurant ownership structure:
corporate, franchise, and family. A
corporate owner is usually passively involved
and hires professional managers to
run all aspects of the business. A franchise
owner may be either passive or actively involved
and follows an operating system to
help standardize the customer experience
and brand name. A family owner is actively
involved in all aspects of the business and
usually encourages other family members to
be involved. In addition, each ideal type
may be combined with another ideal type to
illustrate a hybrid ownership structure. For
instance, a family may own and run a franchise
operation which would operate differently
from a true franchise or true family
business. I intend to use a qualitative, multiple
case study research method by interviewing
owners and managers of all six
Department of Management
Management
Mentor: Dr. William Gillis
restaurant ownership structures, along with
a sampling of employees from each to determine
the influence of ownership structure,
size, and the effect of human resource policies.
It is hypothesized that smaller businesses
(based upon number of employees
and units) will have better performance
when they follow an ideal business form.
Also, it is hypothesized that larger businesses
will more likely become hybrid organizations
as well as more formal in their human
resource practices. Performance will be selfevaluated
based on a subjective rating of
managers/owners as well as employee performance,
and employee satisfaction.
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