The renormalization of general theories with inter-family mixing of Dirac and/or Majorana fermions is studied at the one-loop electroweak order. The phenomenological significance of the mixing-matrix renormalization is discussed, within the context of models based on the SU(2) L ⊗U(1) Y gauge group. The effect of radiative neutrino masses present in these models is naturally taken into account in this formulation. As an example, charged-lepton universality in pion decays is investigated in the heavy-neutrino limit. Non-decoupling heavy-neutrino effects induced by mixing renormalization are found to considerably affect the predictions in these new-physics scenarios.