Volume 11, Issue 3 - Special Issue: A Governance Approach of Emotions: For more meaningful entrepreneurial and family businesses; Guest Editors: Rania Labaki and Giorgia M. D’Allura

While emotion in family business is beginning to garner closer attention among researchers, the nexus of emotion management and governance has received little attention to date. In this essay, we reflect on and extend the Special Issue contributions by integrating the emotion management literature with the family business and governance literatures. We suggest a governance approach of emotion through a multilevel integrated framework. We introduce “emotion governance” as an overarching set of informal and formal mechanisms that are rooted and developed in the embedded family business contexts. We argue that emotion governance influences the explicit emotion management strategies of family business members at different stages: ex-ante (incentive alignment), during the process (education and support), and ex-post (monitoring). It thereby contributes to ensure their accountability in line with family business continuity. Considering the heterogeneity of family businesses, we capture nuances in our framework across family business archetypes through a series of propositions. We chart an agenda for future research to advance the development of a theory of family business governance inclusive of emotion.

Members of business families experience ambivalent emotions that stem from paradoxical tensions inherent to family business, namely the overlapping of three systems: the family, the firm, and ownership. In this essay, we shed light on how governance mechanisms can frame the different roles a family member can play in the family, business, and ownership systems, making role conflict and the subsequent emotional ambivalence a source of creativity rather than of emotional dissonance. These governance mechanisms may also contribute to reducing risks for interpersonal conflict as well as provide rules for conflict resolution. Building on the typology distinguishing among Enmeshed Family Business (EFB), Balanced Family Business (BFB), and Disengaged Family Business (DFB), we suggest governance mechanisms to support emotion management within each archetype at the individual, family and firm levels.

It has been suggested in the family business literature that the pursuit of socioemotional wealth (SEW) has both a bright and dark side and these conflicting priorities can have a negative impact on the quality of decisions made by family managers. This paper presents a model which recognizes that ambivalence emanating from socioemotional wealth may also lead to high calibre decision-making under certain contexts. In particular, we explain how emotional ambivalence can affect the decision-making abilities of family managers. Although emotional complexity and the resulting ambivalence is seen as an undesirable situation, we argue that this could also result in positive outcomes under certain circumstances. More specifically, emotional ambivalence prompts leaders to adopt a broader perspective and consider several alternatives before reaching a decision, hence enhancing decision-making quality. However, we acknowledge that emotional ambivalence may also lead to an overly restrictive focus on the family’s interests occasionally leading to inferior family-centric decisions.

In this article, we examine the factors which lead to CEOs’ joy of working for the family firm, as it is expected to contribute to their willingness to invest in its perpetuation and success. We focus on three such factors: CEOs’ collective psychological ownership, their individual psychological ownership, and CEOs’ stewardship behavior. We find that on the one hand, the relationship between CEOs’ collective psychological ownership and their joy of working for the family business is mediated by their stewardship behavior, and on the other hand, stewardship behavior mediates the relationship between CEOs’ individual psychological ownership and their joy of work. We make valuable contributions to psychological ownership literature, to stewardship literature, and to the literature on joy and joy at work.

This article aims to understand how emerging conflicts evolve and generate negative emotions during family firms’ succession process. Relying on previous research on emotional dissonance and conflict, we conduct a single longitudinal case study by interviewing the successor, the predecessor, and other family members in a family firm in the Tunisian context. The results show that emotional dissonance plays a critical role in conflict escalation between successors and predecessors. Family systems and cultural factors explain challenges in managing emotions; however, emotions associated with family events can facilitate the evolution of the succession process by resolving conflict. This study thus reveals how and why emotions and conflicts arise during the succession process.

Even though family firms are characterized by an overlap between the family and business systems, family business research has focused separately on how family firms compete (i. e., strategic behavior) and how families are involved their firms (i. e., types of family orientation). With the aim of closing this research gap, we draw on the heterogeneity principle of family firms and the equifinality principle of the configurative approach to conjecture that family firms can successfully adjust their strategic behavior and family business orientation in a variety of ways to enhance their likelihood of survival. We follow a sample of Spanish family firms over an 11-year period (2004–2015) to test our model. Based on the Kaplan–Meier survival estimator and the Cox proportional hazard model, we find that survival likelihood is higher when firms combine a differentiation strategy with a business-first or a family-enterprise-first orientation or when firms follow a low-cost strategy with a family-first orientation.