TY - JOUR
T1 - Emotionally intelligent top management and high family firm performance
T2 - Evidence from Germany
AU - Neffe, Carolin
AU - Wilderom, Celeste P.M.
AU - Lattuch, Frank
N1 - Funding Information:
An earlier version of this article was presented at the 79th Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, August 2019, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. We thank participants for their comments and fruitful discussions.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021
PY - 2021/7/12
Y1 - 2021/7/12
N2 - Executives in family firms are often confronted with emotionally loaded issues, in part due to the need to include the interests of the owning family. Given this context, we hypothesize how high family-firm performance is affected by the emotional intelligence (EI) of a family-based CEO and top-management team (TMT), in addition to the CEO's transformational leadership (TFL) and TMT's behavioral integration. Survey measures were taken from a random sample of 72 CEOs of German family firms and 245 members of their TMTs. We found that TMT behavioral integration mediates between CEO TFL and objective firm performance while CEO EI is significantly related to both CEO TFL and TMT EI. Implications are discussed for future research thereby suggesting an extension to upper-echelon theory.
AB - Executives in family firms are often confronted with emotionally loaded issues, in part due to the need to include the interests of the owning family. Given this context, we hypothesize how high family-firm performance is affected by the emotional intelligence (EI) of a family-based CEO and top-management team (TMT), in addition to the CEO's transformational leadership (TFL) and TMT's behavioral integration. Survey measures were taken from a random sample of 72 CEOs of German family firms and 245 members of their TMTs. We found that TMT behavioral integration mediates between CEO TFL and objective firm performance while CEO EI is significantly related to both CEO TFL and TMT EI. Implications are discussed for future research thereby suggesting an extension to upper-echelon theory.
KW - CEO/TMT Leadership
KW - Emotional intelligence
KW - Family business
KW - Firm performance
KW - TMT Behavioral integration
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85110549407&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.emj.2021.07.007
DO - 10.1016/j.emj.2021.07.007
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85110549407
JO - European management journal
JF - European management journal
SN - 0263-2373
ER -