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Emotionally intelligent top management and high family firm performance: Evidence from Germany

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  • Neffe, Carolin
  • Wilderom, Celeste P.M.
  • Lattuch, Frank

Abstract

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.

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  • Neffe, Carolin & Wilderom, Celeste P.M. & Lattuch, Frank, 2022. "Emotionally intelligent top management and high family firm performance: Evidence from Germany," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 40(3), pages 372-383.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:eurman:v:40:y:2022:i:3:p:372-383
    DOI: 10.1016/j.emj.2021.07.007
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