Are the Sins of the Father the Sins of the Sons, but Not the Daughters? Exploring How Leadership Gender and Generation Impact the Corporate Social Responsibility of Franchise Firms

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review paper entitled “Are the sins of the father the sins of the sons, but not the daughters? Exploring how leadership gender and generation impact the Corporate Social Responsibility of franchise firms“. I have found the topic interesting. The topic is relevant and of current significance. However, I would suggest the authors some revisions to improve the clarity of the paper.

The normative CSR practices and instrumental CSR practices should be explained in greater detail.

All abbreviations should be introduced and explained if they appear for the first time in the manuscript (e.g. R&D, Cr.A).

There is formulated on the lines 254 – 255 that “…data 254 relating to the profile of the franchisor leader (i.e., gender, generation and age)“. It is important to state what is meant by the term generation, since generations are usually associated with age.

If  “AEF” is Spanish acronym (line 257) it is also appropriate to state the original name of the association in the Spanish.

It is necessary to explain what the values given in Table 1 mean.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to read this manuscript. In this paper, you have tried to examine how leadership gender and generation impact the Corporate Social Responsibility of franchise firms. I enjoy reading your paper and I feel the paper makes a good contribution particular to the area of CSR. However, in its current form, I still feel that some minor changes need to be incorporated into the paper to bring it to publishable standard and I outline these below.  

 At the end of your introduction, all on a sudden, you have mentioned that -This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring the CSR practices of 246 franchise businesses in Spain with a focus on exploring leader gender differences and intergenerational succession. Why Spain? You just need to give a justification for selecting Spain.

 Can you please rewrite following sentence in methodology please- “The data collection method used is in line with other research on franchising that has also used national business directories as the main source for the sample selection of franchise systems”

 A better justification could be added for MANOVA tests in results section.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I appreciated the authors’ effort to write this manuscript. This paper is timely and there is an originality and contribution in this paper within the subject matter. However, there are some critical shortcomings. I believe that there is still so much to do for this paper. I outlined the lacking areas and the problems each sections of the paper in detail below.

The research question and method section are not clear. 

Literature review has a great coverage of the study objectives and has an extensive background and review within the subject matter. Two things I would like to mention here. I suggest authors to provide a comprehensive table explaining what has been done within the subject matter with author citations on the topic. Also, streamline this section as it is somewhat hard to read as is.

The authors need to extend the limitation and implications of the study. For a paper like this, the authors specifically need to discuss the future research avenues in detail based on the review critique they provided. Has attention been paid to the clarity of expression and readability.

I suggest improving the literature review analyzing these publications:

VALERI M. (2021), Organizational Studies. Implications for the Strategic Management, Springer, Switzerland 

VALERI M., KATSONI V. (Eds.) (2021), Gender and tourism: challenges and entrepreneurial opportunities, Emerald Publishing, UK

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf