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Family Involvement in Middle Management and Its Impact on the Labor Productivity of Family Firms
Archive ouverte : Article de revue
Edité par HAL CCSD ; Wiley-Blackwell: No OnlineOpen
International audience. Family business owners and researchers tend to overwhelmingly focus on thetop-level structure of firms but ignore the middle-level practice – involving familymembers in the middle-management team. Compared to top managers at the strategicapex, middle-level managers are mainly responsible for internal operations and control,and the composition of the middle-management team has an immediate and directimpact on the overall workforce efficiency of family firms. Integrating agency theory andorganizational justice perspective, we proposed that family involvement in middlemanagement would have a negative impact on the labor productivity of family firms. Wefurther corroborated this effect by identifying three boundary conditions at the individual(i.e., familial CEO), organizational (i.e., firm size), and regional (i.e., labor mobility) levels.Using a sample of 1,284 privately owned family firms in China, we found that familyinvolvement in middle management, measured as the percentage of familial middle-levelmanagers, was negatively associated with labor productivity. Furthermore, this negativerelationship existed only when the CEO is a family member rather than a professionalmanager, when the size of the firm is large rather than small, or when the firm is locatedin regions with low rather than high labor mobility. These findings contribute to familybusiness literature and provide practical implications for human resource management infamily firms.