Management control mechanisms and stewardship in family firms: an analysis of antecedents and consequences

• Ano de defesa: 2018
• Autor(a) principal: Mucci, Daniel Magalhães
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Desempenho da empresa familiar; Empresas familiares; Justiça processual; Mecanismos de controle gerencial; Riqueza sócio-emocional; Teoria do stewardship
• Link de acesso: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/12/12136/tde-22032018-170200/

This dissertation aims to enhance the understanding of stewardship in family firms by studying its antecedents related to the controlling family\'s ability and willingness to influence the firm, management control mechanisms design and procedural justice and its consequences regardingits moderating effect onthe relationship between family involvement and performance. First, we explore the heterogeneity among family businesses, by considering the influence of a family\'s ability and willingness on the design of formal and participative management control mechanisms. We define ability as the level of family involvement in ownership and in management. Willingness is based on the socioemotional wealth (SEW) literature, which refers to the controlling family\'s affect-related value invested in the firm. We focus on the following SEW sub-dimensions (1) family control and influence (2) and renewal of family bonds. Second, we investigate whether management control mechanisms such as goal setting and performance evaluation often installed to curb manager\'s opportunistic behavior, stimulate stewardship in family firms. We focus on the degree of participation and formality applied to these management control mechanisms, which elements are studied in the procedural justice literature. Therefore, we discuss how management control mechanisms\' design and procedural justice are associated with stewardship. Stewardship implies a collective-serving and pro-organizational attitudes and behaviors and constitutes a distinctive characteristic of family firms. Third, we examine whether a stewardship-oriented culture moderates the association between family involvement and family firm performance, whereby family involvement is a sub-item of the familiness construct, which focuses on the interaction between family members and its business.To test these relationships in an empirical way, we developed a survey and selected data from medium and large Brazilian family firms. We applied Structural Equation Modeling (SmartPLS) as the main data analysis method to test our hypotheses. The contributions of this study are multiple to the literature. First, more insights are provided in the adoption of participative and formal management control mechanisms in family firms and how a family\'s willingness to influence the firm creates different adoption patterns. We also demonstrate that different SEW intentions must be treated separately since each sub-dimension influences the design of management control mechanisms in the family business in a different way. Second, the results show how formal and participative goal setting and performance evaluation stimulate stewardship identification and stewardship-oriented culture in the family firm. This study provides evidence to practitioners that goal setting and performance evaluation, usually studied as agency mechanisms can foster stewardship in the family firm if they are designed based on the fairness principles. Third, the study reveals that the relationship between familiness and family firm performance is moderated by a stewardship-oriented culture, indicating patterns that lead to a higher financial performance.