The paper investigates the Brain Drain in Chinese family business based on a sample of 319 family businesses in China. Using a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to uncover different combinations of conditions (pay and welfare, work environment, management style of the leaders, and career planning) that are sufficient to achieve high and low brain drain. The results show that pay and welfare is a necessary but not a sufficient condition by itself to achieve high brain drain. The findings show that three causal recipes are equifinal in achieving high brain drain. The first causal recipe combines high work environment with low level of career planning and with high pay and welfare. The second combines low work environment with high level of career planning and with high pay and welfare. Finally, the third combines high work environment with high level of management style of the leaders and with high pay and welfare. The study also found two causal configurations that are equifinal to achieve low brain drain. Moreover, these combinations are not a mirror of the combinations founded for high brain drain. This study offers several implications to both researchers and business practitioners: It is acquired that in order to prevent brain drain, the pay and welfare of employees should be raised while the management philosophy should pay attention to humans in the first place. Secondly, the leaders need to improve their own quality so as to strengthen the management of family businesses. Finally, a refined human resource system needs to be established. After brain drain, enterprises should perfect their contract constraining mechanism and, bring in suitable talents promptly so that the loss is minimised.

• Huifen (Helen) Cai(Middlesex University London, UK)
• Graça Miranda Silva(Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)