Exploring the relation between family involvement and firms’ financial performance: A replication and extension meta-analysis

This study replicates and extends the meta-analyses on family firm performance by O'Boyle et al. (2012). Based on the empirical findings of 1095 primary studies from 61 countries, we find an economically small but statistically significant positive impact of family influence on firms’ financial performance. This outperformance occurs particularly for large and listed firms, as well as for accounting rather than market performance measures. Furthermore, we investigate the potential moderation effects of different country cultural dimensions, as operationalized by the Hofstede and GLOBE framework. We find higher family firm performance effects for countries with a higher degree of individualism, masculinity, long-term orientation performance orientation, and a lower degree of power distance. We find only small differences in the mean effect sizes of family firm performance across different academic disciplines.

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