Leadership in and of Family Companies: A Theoretical Review

Abstract

Up to now, the established leadership research has widely ignored the specific leadership practices in family-run companies. This is quite astonishing given the fact that today 70–90% of all companies worldwide (regional variations considered) belong to this type of enterprises. On the other hand, the currently strongly expanding research on the peculiarities of family companies touches the topic of leadership only in a very implicit way when dealing with the influence of the owner family on the future corporate development. In this article, we present the leading theoretical approaches in this special field of research, in particular with a view to their explanatory power as well as their paradigmatic limitations in comparison to the possibilities of a systemic approach to leadership and organization. The aim of this comparison is to sharpen the theoretical perception of the peculiarities of Leadership & management in family-run enterprises.