It’s a Family Affair: A Case for Consistency in Family Foundation Giving and Family Firm Community CSR Activity

Cristina Cruz (), Hana Milanov () and Judit Klein ()
Additional contact information
Cristina Cruz: IE Business School
Hana Milanov: Technical University of Munich
Judit Klein: Technical University of Munich

Journal of Business Ethics, 2024, vol. 191, issue 3, No 11, 633-649

Abstract: Abstract Although most business-owning families (BOFs) that operate large family firms practice community social engagement both in private via family foundations and in the business domain via community corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs, the relationship between their activities in the two domains remains unclear. Prior literature speculates that BOFs will deprioritize firms’ community CSR when they have family foundations as more efficient vehicles to achieve socioemotional wealth (SEW), which would imply that such BOFs are less ethical in operating their firms. We contrast these speculations by enriching the socioemotional wealth (SEW) approach with instrumental stakeholder theory and cue consistency arguments and theorize that BOFs seek to ensure consistency between their activities in the two domains. Using data from 2008 to 2018 on the 95 largest US public family firms whose BOFs also operate private foundations, we show a positive relationship between family foundation giving and firm community CSR activity. Furthermore, we provide evidence for the boundary conditions of this relationship, showing that it is weaker for firms that do not share the family’s name and stronger for those firms with family leaders who also lead their families’ foundations.

Keywords: Family firms; Family foundations; Community CSR; Socioemotional wealth; Instrumental stakeholder theory; Cue consistency; Business ethics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-023-05424-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:191:y:2024:i:3:d:10.1007_s10551-023-05424-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-023-05424-x

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().