BackA generational perspective of family firms' social capital: Interplay between ethical leadership and firm performance
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Date
2023-04Author
Maseda García, Amaia 
Iturralde Jainaga, Txomin
Alayo Anasagasti, Mikel
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Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility 32(2) : 773-789 (2023)
Abstract
This study proposes and tests a model that integrates ethical leadership, internal social capital, and firm performance in small- and medium-sized family firms at different generational stages. Using the upper echelons theory and the social capital perspective of familiness, this study shows that ethical leadership can explain the effectiveness of certain behaviors in relation to family firm performance. Moreover, social capital helps spread a leader's business ethics to firm members, thus improving the family firm's performance. Our results show that founders' personalities and identities determine high internal social capital, which decreases over generations. The study also shows that internal social capital is a communicative element crucial to ethical leadership, facilitating the absorption of the culture and values of the family in the firm. This powerful resource should be promoted and supported by coherent behavior over time by senior leaders.
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as © 2023 The Authors. Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.