Are Family Firms Stewards? Public Family Firms’ Stewardship Toward Shareholders and Stakeholders

Stewardship theory often remains unclear about how controlling families serve their stewardship under the conflicting goals across non-family stakeholders. We examine this issue by distinguishing family firms’ stewardship as financial and social stewardship. We propose that, in publicly listed family firms, controlling families’ stewardship in financial dimension decrease their stewardship in social dimension. Furthermore, the negative relationship will be greater for family firms with a large stake of foreign ownership but lesser for firms with family CEOs. We tested our hypotheses based on publicly listed firms in Korea. Our study contextualizes the family firms’ stewardship behaviors by considering goal heterogeneity.