Family firm employees: identification, stewardship practices and citizenship behaviors

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.

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