Turning familiness into firm performance: non-family employees' justice perceptions as the missing link

Abstract

Family firms with comparable resources often diverge sharply in performance, yet the reasons remain unclear. This study examines how three components of perceived familiness – organizational decision-making, family culture and family image – transform into perceived firm performance via non-family employees' perceptions of distributive and interactional justice. Survey data from 400 white-collar employees in family businesses in Türkiye were used to test a model integrating the resource-based view and social exchange theory. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) assessed both the measurement model and the direct and indirect (mediating) structural effects. Family culture and family image were strong antecedents of both distributive and interactional justice, whereas organizational decision-making had no significant effect on either. Both justice dimensions substantially enhanced perceived firm performance, with distributive justice being the more powerful. Mediation analyses confirmed that culture and image reach performance only through justice, whereas decision-making does not – thereby establishing organizational justice as the mechanism that converts the cultural and image components of familiness into firm-level outcomes. Integrating the resource-based view with social exchange theory, the study shows that family resources are not inherently performance-generating; their value is realized only when employees decode them as fairness. It disaggregates familiness into components that reach performance through different routes, repositions justice from a micro-level attitude to a meso-level mechanism and reconciles the long-standing tension between socioemotional wealth and agency-based accounts of the family effect.