Family firm employees: identification, stewardship practices and citizenship behaviors

Abstract

PurposeThis paper aims to understand the factors that influence employee organizational identification in family firms, and through identification, the willingness to engage in citizenship behaviors.Design/methodology/approachDrawing from the stewardship theory, the authors develop a model to test the relationships between family relatedness and relational identification to the family firm owner, employee-focused stewardship practices, organizational identification and organizational citizenship behaviors. The authors test the hypotheses using regression and the Preacher and Hayes PROCESS macro on a sample of 292 family firm employees.FindingsThe findings suggest that both relational identification with the family firm owner and employee-focused stewardship practices positively influence organizational identification, and that familial ties to the family firm owner can influence relationships with citizenship behaviors for non-family employees.Originality/valueThe authors build on existing literature to investigate how employees identify themselves within a family firm and how stewardship practices from the employee's perspective (rather than managers' or founders' perspectives) can influence organizational identification and citizenship behaviors.

Kinship and Gender in Family Firms: New Insights Into Employees’ Organizational Citizenship Behavior

“…This finding reinforces the applicability of reciprocal altruism (e.g., Eddleston & Kellermanns, 2007) and highlights the importance of stewardship-like behaviors in family firms (Davis et al, 2010;Eddleston & Kellermanns, 2007;Pearson & Marler, 2010). While recent research shows that OCB is enhanced when employees strongly identify with the family and the family firm (Matherne et al, 2017;Medina-Craven et al, 2020), our research introduces altruistic leadership behavior as another mechanism that can promote employees' OCB in family firms. Together, these studies illuminate important antecedents to the discretionary citizenship behaviors that are so essential to family firm success.…”

“…Matherne et al (2017) find that identification with the owning family increases employees' OCB. The findings of Medina-Craven et al (2020) lend support to these claims by demonstrating that identification with both the family business and the owning family can enhance employees' OCB. In all, this research indicates that the owning family is a unique target of identification that can lead to employee behavior that is beneficial to the family's business (Matherne et al, 2017).…”

A manager's stewardship identification in Brazilian family firms: the role of controls' design and procedural justice

“…In contrast to arguments from the agency literature but also from stewardship literature with respect to the impact of formal controls, we provide evidence that traditional formal agency controls are associated with stewardship identification through manager's perception of the fairness of these controls (Lubatkin, Ling, & Schulze, 2007;Barnett & Kellermanns, 2006). This study also provides insights into the moderating effect of a manager's family affiliation status on the relationship between the procedural justice perceptions of the controls with a manager's stewardship identification (e.g., Medina-Craven et al, 2020), considering that family and nonfamily managers have different attitudes which might influence this relationship. The results indicate that the fairness perception with respect to PM is much more important in the relationship between PM and a manager's stewardship identification when a manager is not affiliated with the family.…”

“…In addition, we investigate whether a manager's family affiliation moderates the relationship between fairness and stewardship attitude. This is particularly important since prior literature shows that family members' relationship with the firm usually arises and is nurtured by their family ties while nonfamily managers build their relationship based on the informal (i.e., trust, long-term job tenure, psychological ownership) and formal organizational processes and design that are adopted by the firm (Henssen, Voordeckers, Lambrechts, & Koiranen, 2014;Ramos, Man, Mustafa, & Ng, 2014;Medina-Craven et al, 2020). These different relational ties to the family might have implications towards how individual's perceptions in their job (being the procedural justice perception with respect to the family firm's controls) influence manager's stewardship identification with the family firm.…”

“…Our study contributes to the literature by providing insights into how participation and formality in target setting and performance measurement are related to stewardship identification. Hernandez (2012, p. 173) suggests that researchers should examine the "antecedents that facilitate and explain the emergence of stewardship behaviors," which are included in organizational-level mechanisms, such as managerial controls (Bormann et al, 2020;Medina-Craven et al, 2020). Our study provides empirical evidence that certain design choices of controls are more associated with stewardship identification than others, providing additional insights to the family business literature on how controls can be considered as antecedents to stewardship identification (e.g., Davis et al, 2010;Neubaum et al, 2017;James et al, 2017).…”