Agency and stewardship theories are prominent perspectives to examine myriad issues within family firms. Although considered opposing theories, both address the same phenomena: the individual-level behaviors and firm-level governance mechanisms that predict organizational outcomes. Accordingly, we review and synthesize these theories concurrently, using the concepts of behavior and governance as our organizing framework. Our review encompasses 107 family firm articles grounded in agency and/or stewardship theory, published between 2000 and 2014 in 24 journals across several disciplines. Additionally, we identify future research areas that provide scholars opportunities to push theoretical boundaries and offer further insights into the family firm.

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The study of the roles, impact, and challenges associated with nonfamily members in family firms has generated considerable attention in the literature. To gain an appreciation of this body of knowledge, we systematically review 82 articles on nonfamily members in family firms that were published in 34 journals over the past three decades. We synthesize the literature according to three broad, yet overlapping themes: preemployment considerations, employment considerations, and outcomes of nonfamily employment. We then offer a future research agenda that integrates these themes to guide the advancement of knowledge on nonfamily members in family firms.

Upper echelon theory highlights the importance of top management teams in large and established firms; however, effects are not always clear outside of this context. Due to the unique nature of new ventures, the composition of entrepreneurial teams and its effects on performance is worthy of investigation. Accordingly, we meta-analyze the effect of three characteristics of entrepreneurial team composition (i.e., aggregated, heterogeneity, team size) on new venture performance. Our meta-analysis, which includes 55 empirical samples and 8,892 observations, finds significant and unique effects of entrepreneurial team characteristics on new ventures. Based on our findings, we derive avenues for future research.

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This article theoretically and empirically intertwines agency and stewardship theories to examine their distinct and combined influences on family firms. Primary matched triadic data from CEOs, family employees, and nonfamily employees in 77 family firms suggest that agency and stewardship governance affects individual-level behavior and firm-level performance. Specifically, agent behavior is highest under conditions of coexisting low agency governance and high stewardship governance and is lowest when agency and stewardship governance coexist at high levels. Furthermore, when high levels of agency and stewardship governance coexist, family firm performance is the highest. Theoretical implications and future research directions are discussed.

Our research is one of the first to examine spiritual leadership, which lies at the crossroads of workplace spirituality and transcendental leadership, within the context of family firms. We describe how the unique characteristics of family firms allow for and encompass spiritual leadership. First, we adapt the construct of spiritual leadership to the firm level. Then, analyzing dyadic data, we provide empirical support for the emerging theory of spiritual leadership by linking the spiritual bond between leader and follower to organizational citizenship behavior, a new dependent variable in the nomological net of spiritual leadership. We further explore the relationship in subsets of our data, finding that the relationship holds for family members but does not hold for non-family employees of the family business. Implications and avenues for future research are discussed.