Abstract:

Purpose – Present study aims to shed light on some of the HR issues of family businesses, including organizational justice, pay satisfaction, and turnover intentions of family business employees compared to non-family business employees. Design/methodology/approach – 301 family and non-family business workers from USA were surveyed. Regression analysis used to test the relationships and MANOVA was used to test difference between groups. Findings – Results show that while family business employees are less satisfied with benefit packages, their distributive justice perceptions, pay perceptions, and turnover intentions are not significantly different from non-family employees’. Furthermore, moderation analysis reveals that family involvement does not significantly change the relationship level between distributive justice, pay perceptions and turnover intentions. Discussion – According to our results family business managers should be careful with benefit packages and pay attention to keep a just environment to prevent possible increased turnover. Furthermore, family business managers should keep familiness impact under control so that it does not reach to a significant level to impact justice perceptions and turnover intentions. While family business literature is developing constantly, non-family employee issues, particularly blue-collar worker issues are very limited. This study showed that family businesses are neither good nor bad regarding blue-collar employee HR issues and family and non-family business employees are not different in their justice perceptions. This valuable contribution should lead researchers to seek additional constructs to evaluate causes of family firm HR issues.

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