An important difference between FBs and NFBs is the (non-)integration of the owners in
management. As depicted above, for FBs, the personal union of owners and managers
should results in lower agency costs and a more stewardship-like culture compared to the
situation in NFBs. To maintain this kind of culture, controlling families are rather reluctant
to include non-family managers into their management teams, as this would separate
ownership and control, and thus the same level of mutual trust and stewardship could not be
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expected between owners and manager anymore (Lutz et al., 2010). As shown in the middle
branch of Figure 2, controlling families often pursue the goal of undivided decision-making
power in “their” firm. To keep up the family’s undivided decision making power, the owners
in FBs may also try to keep non-family managers out of important management positions,
such as the CFO position, as these managers could also claim decision-making power
themselves (Voordeckers et al., 2007). In NFBs, the situation is quite different, as there are
per se primarily non-owners in important management positions, and thus considerations to
keep up the owners’ decision making power in management positions are not at all or at least
less present. Therefore in contrast to NFB owners, the owners of FBs may also want to
maintain all managerial power in the FB, despite lacking sufficient deep finance know-how.
Controlling families might (as long as possible) keep out external experts, such as CFOs.
However, as discussed in section 4.4, if FBs finally need to hire a CFO, they can be expected
to give the CFO a higher total compensation than a family member CFO without keeping up
with the quantitative compensation in comparable NFBs (proposition 4a).