Family firm employees: identification, stewardship practices and citizenship behaviors
Journal of Family Business Management
ISSN: 2043-6238
Article publication date: 4 August 2020
Issue publication date: 21 October 2021
Abstract
Purpose
This 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/approach
Drawing 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.
Findings
The 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/value
The 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.
Keywords
Citation
Medina-Craven, M.N., Cooper, D., Penney, C. and Caldas, M.P. (2021), "Family firm employees: identification, stewardship practices and citizenship behaviors", Journal of Family Business Management, Vol. 11 No. 4, pp. 538-554. https://doi.org/10.1108/JFBM-05-2020-0046
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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