Destructive and productive family relationships: A stewardship theory perspective

Psychological contract and social exchange in family firms

“…Participative decisionmaking can enhance the performance of both the individual (Lam, Chen and Schaubroeck, 2002) and the organisation (Eddleston and Kellermanns, 2007). Social exchange theory and the psychological contract framework suggest that a participative decision-making process fulfils relational obligations in the psychological contract.…”

“…Family firm performance was measured using growth-centric items related to changes in sales, employees, market share, and profitability (Eddleston and Kellermanns, 2007). Specifically, we asked family member respondents to indicate whether the different facets of family firm growth were much lower or higher compared to their competitors on a 7-point Likert-type scale, which also implicitly controlled for industry differences.…”

“…Participative decision-making was measured using Thomas and McDaniel's (1990) scale and adapted for family firms by Eddleston and Kellermanns (2007). Perceptions of distributive justice were measured using an established scale (DeConinck and Bachmann, 2005) that was also reworded to increase its relevance to family firms.…”

“…Managers and owners who want to reap the performance benefits of succession planning should consider involving family-member employees in regular conversations related to the firm's future because of the opportunities to learn from diverse viewpoints (Edmondson, 1999). Although managers may avoid these kinds of interactions to limit the painful effects of conflict (Beckhard and Dyer, 1983) that can be found in family firms (Eddleston and Kellermanns, 2007), or because control over family firms is often centralised in one manager even though ownership is dispersed across many family members (Gersick, 1997), they can still encourage beneficial interactions by providing open forums for employees to share ideas and information learned during conferences or interactions with clients and suppliers. Although leadership alone is insufficient for enforcing open knowledge-sharing environments, managers can help to foster these exchanges by listening to employees carefully, providing time for reflection, and encouraging employees with different points of view to share them (Garvin, Edmondson and Gino, 2008).…”

“…The lasting relationships between family-member employees can foster beneficial reciprocal exchanges (Lubatkin, Ling and Schulze, 2007;Sirmon and Hitt, 2003), which in turn generate extraordinary commitment (Aronoff and Ward, 1995;Carmon et al, 2010) and trust between family members (Bubolz, 2001;Schulze, Lubatkin and Dino, 2003). Unfortunately, these relationships can also negatively impact family firm performance (Eddleston and Kellermanns, 2007) through detrimental conflict (Harvey and Evans, 1994) and perceptions of inequity (Kidwell, Kellermanns and Eddleston, 2012) that threaten the firm's future (Danes et al, 1999).…”