Purpose
This paper aims to investigate the drivers of sustainability in family businesses globally. It examines how strategic and socio-emotional considerations shape sustainability adoption and distinguishes between voluntary adoption and adoption driven by external pressure, an issue that remains underexplored in the family business literature.

Design/methodology/approach
The study adopts a mixed-method approach to understand the motivations for sustainability adoption and study their interconnections. The factors were identified from the literature and supported through conducting semi-structured interviews with the managers or owners of family businesses from several countries. Their interconnections are studied using the total interpretive structural modelling-polarity (TISM-P) technique, and relevance was identified through cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) analysis.

Findings
The results highlight that socio-emotional wealth creation, especially preserving identity, values and succession planning, is the strategic driver for adopting sustainability in family businesses.

Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to identify the motivations for sustainable business practices in family businesses, study their interconnections and categorise the motivations based on their relevance to the decision using the TISM-P.