Antecedents and outcomes of bifurcated compensation in family firms: A multilevel view

Abstract

Through a multilevel view, this article challenges the dominant assumption in the literature suggesting that family employees will receive more compensation than their non-family peers, which will violate the latter group justice perceptions and will lead them to lower their inputs to retrieve equity. We start by discussing how competing socioemotional priorities combine with the degree of collectivism at the societal level to affect which group will bifurcated compensation favor. We suggest that embeddedness in a collectivist culture will generate a strong desire and a moral obligation to cater to the financial well-being of family members, hence leading to bifurcated compensation favoring family employees. In individualist cultures, however, the family will accord high importance to achieving family prominence, which leads to bifurcated compensation favoring non-family employees. Moving forward, we discuss how nepotism types shape the effect of bifurcated compensation on the under-privileged group work inputs and how this relationship is moderated by the extent of power distance embedded in society. Theoretical and empirical implications are discussed at the end of the paper.