Growing up in a business family where almost everyone was an entrepreneur such as father, mother, uncle, brother in law and even neighbors. What seemed to be a family thing in one of the small town in the Republic of Congo was in fact, one of the greatest activities in the world. According to some authors (Kuratko &Richard, 2004; Davis and Harveston 1998; Hodgetts, 2004; Lam, 2009), more than 90 percent of all enterprise in the world is a family business. In Malaysia, SMEs accounts for 99.2 of all businesses GDP (SME Annual Report 2006- Negara Malaysia).
However, Researchers have shown that only 30 percent of all families businesses go into the second generation and more or less 15 percent that sees the third generation (Friedrich, 2011& Davis 1998). Employees’ theft is one of the main reasons for that failure as it is responsible for about 33 per cent of bankruptcies that occur (Walsch, 2000; Kennedy, 2012; Nkonoki, 2010; Gill, 2008; Katsouris and Aaron Sayne, 2013; Hinds, 2005 Hollinger and Davis (2001).
Kennedy (2012) argued that employee theft occurring specifically within small businesses has received much less empirical attention, and almost no attention has been given to how these acts affect the owners and managers of small businesses and the study of Iyenda (2005) has demonstrated how it was difficult to build a successful enterprise in Kinshasa and adding the employee’s theft on top it can only cause more damages.
The present article has asked one question “How employers and owners can protect their family business from theft and fraud”
The retail council of Canada report have demonstrated the 10, 10 and 80 rules that said that 10 percent of your employees will never steal from you, the other 10 will always steal from you whenever the circumstances that goes hands to hands to the greedy one. But what is so interesting is that the rest of the 80 will go either that way or mostly depending of the opportunity that has been presented to them.
The hanover insurance group has proposed some rules that entrepreneur can use among that: Pre-employment Screening, Procedural Controls and Devices, Improving Job Satisfaction and Apprehension and Prosecution.
This study stated that these principals are relevant in Kinshasa and it will reduce theft among employees. Please read more in the attached article.
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