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This paper aims to analyze how performance may be defined in the context of a religious organization. The authors do so by studying the case of a Benedictine abbey.

Using an etymologically derived understanding of performance, and predominantly based on the Regula Benedicti (the central guideline for Benedictine monks), the authors first conceptually develop an understanding of performance in Benedictine abbeys. The authors then apply this understanding in a single case study.

The authors found that in order to comply with the Benedictine mission laid out in the Regula Benedicti, Benedictine abbeys need to balance sacred and secular goals. The authors also derived six key actions in order to accomplish these goals. The case study shows that an imbalance in these key actions may cause severe (financial) distress.

The study provides an alternative framing of the term “performance” and further evidence that only a combined pursuit of sacred and secular goals seems useful for religious organizations. Researchers interested in religious organizations might find the conceptual approach and findings useful to analyze performance in such organizations.

Benedictine abbeys and other religious organizations may find the analysis valuable to critically analyze their current strategies and focal activities. Moreover, this paper's results might also be worthwhile for other faith-based or third-sector organizations when seeking an alternative framing of performance.

This paper provides a new framing of “performance” and is the first to analyze what performance might mean in the context of a Benedictine abbey.

How family businesses (FBs) manage to survive in the long term is still not well understood in FB research. A promising concept to explain survivability, that is currently heavily discussed in the management literature is organizational ambidexterity (OA) – the ability to balance exploring and exploiting activities at the same time. However, FB research has not yet taken sufficient advantage of the potential of OA to contribute to explaining the ability of later-generation FBs to survive. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Using central tenets of agency theory, this conceptual paper draws together findings from the FB literature and the OA literature to create a framework for the relationship between family involvement and the ability to reach high levels of OA.

Seven propositions are developed which suggest that the level of family involvement in ownership and management affect the ability of later-generation FBs to reach high levels of OA. They further suggest that the number of family shareholders, the existence of majority family shareholders, and generational involvement of the controlling family in management moderate these relationships.

This is the first paper to theoretically analyze OA in later-generation FBs. The seven propositions and avenues for further research presented in this paper are intended to motivate FB research to take a closer look at OA. This may be crucial to better explaining and predicting one of business-owning families’ most important goals: the long-term survival of the FB.

Benedictine abbeys are highly stable organisations that have existed for almost 1,500 years. The extant literature ascribes this stability in part to the notion of Benedictine governance, which centres on the Rule of St Benedict (RB). An integral part of Benedictine governance is the cellarer, who plays a role comparable to that of a chief financial officer (CFO) in a traditional corporation. Unlike corporations, however, in which the CFO has emerged into a more important role over the past few decades, the cellarer has been an official position in Benedictine abbeys since the introduction of the RB in the sixth century. The present paper aims to explore the cellarer's role and assesses which parts of it could be reasonably transferred to the corporate world.

Informed by organisational role theory, the authors conducted a single case study in an Austrian Benedictine abbey. The authors used group discussions and semi-structured interviews as the main research instruments.

The authors find that the cellarer's behaviour shows strong signs of stewardship, which could serve as a role model for corporate CFOs. However, because of the studied abbey's situation of financial distress, the cellarer also experienced severe role conflicts rooted in his obedience to the abbot, the high involvement of the abbey in the local economy, and the cellarer's conscience as a Christian monk. From these findings, the authors describe those aspects of the cellarer's role that should thus be avoided for corporate CFOs.

The presented findings are based on a single case study. Therefore, because of the contextual factors idiosyncratic to the abbey under investigation, the results must be interpreted with care. Nevertheless, the findings explain the cellarer's role and depict its potential benefits for the corporate world, which should induce further research.

This is the first paper to explore in-depth the cellarer's role as well as one of the first to transfer the potential benefits of single roles rooted in Benedictine governance to the corporate world.