A manager's stewardship identification in Brazilian family firms: the role of controls' design and procedural justice
Journal of Family Business Management
ISSN: 2043-6238
Article publication date: 4 April 2022
Issue publication date: 16 May 2023
Abstract
Purpose
The paper investigates whether a family firm's control context is directly associated with a manager's stewardship attitude or whether this relationship is mediated by the manager's perception with respect to the fairness of the control processes.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors have sent a survey to family businesses in Brazil. The authors tested the hypotheses with the data collected from 141 responding family and nonfamily managers with the use of structural equation modeling (SEM) analyses (SmartPLS).
Findings
The authors find that more participative and more formal controls are associated with higher procedural justice perceptions. Zooming in on the types of control, namely forward-looking action controls, like target setting (TS), and backward-looking results controls, like performance measurement (PM), the authors observe that TS is significantly positively associated with stewardship identification through a manager's procedural justice perceptions for both control characteristics (partial mediation for participative TS and full mediation for formal TS). PM on the other hand is only significantly directly related to a stewardship identification if it is of a participative character. In addition, the authors find a significant moderating effect of family affiliation, increasing the strength of the association between PM procedural justice and stewardship identification for nonfamily managers.
Originality/value
Prior literature focused on discussing stewardship attitudes and behaviors in family firms, but few provided empirical evidence that a stewardship attitude in a family firm is associated with contextual factors, like the design of controls in family firms in combination with a manager's individual perception of family firm's process factors.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful for the project's support from the Department of Accounting and Finance of the University of Antwerp and from the Department of Accounting and Actuarial Sciences of the University of São Paulo. The authors also want to thank the comments received from the discussant Bingbing Ge and the participants at the 16th EIASM Workshop on Family Firm Management Research.
Citation
Mucci, D.M., Jorissen, A. and Frezatti, F. (2023), "A manager's stewardship identification in Brazilian family firms: the role of controls' design and procedural justice", Journal of Family Business Management, Vol. 13 No. 2, pp. 335-355. https://doi.org/10.1108/JFBM-12-2021-0150
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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