Family Business in the #MeToo Era: Lessons from Ruth on Tone at the Top

Dov Fischer () and Hershey Friedman
Additional contact information
Dov Fischer: Brooklyn College

Humanistic Management Journal, 2021, vol. 6, issue 1, No 4, 37-55

Abstract: Abstract In the biblical Book of Ruth, Boaz instructs his workers not to molest Ruth. We draw insights on the problem of workplace sexual harassment in the family-firm setting from the Book of Ruth. We then integrate these insights with several discrete findings in the literatures on workplace sexual harassment and family firms: First, family firms are relatively strong when it comes to a culture of fairness and respect. Second, family firms sometimes lack formal codes of ethics, which could hamper integrity. Third, religious exemplars can reinforce the positive culture of family firms and even substitute for a formal code of ethics. Fourth, religious exemplars can also attenuate excessive risk-taking behavior in family firms.

Keywords: Religion; Family firms; Fairness; Respect; Integrity; Tone at the top; Sexual ethics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s41463-020-00079-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:humman:v:6:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1007_s41463-020-00079-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/41463

DOI: 10.1007/s41463-020-00079-6

Access Statistics for this article

Humanistic Management Journal is currently edited by Michael Pirson

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