The Influence of Familiness on Decision-Making Quality in Top Management Teams: the Role of Emotional Dissonance and Perceived Team Support

This article studies the relationship between familiness, approached from a new systems theory perspective, and decision-making quality in family firm top management teams. We focus on two potential explanations of this relationship by examining the mediating role of emotional dissonance and perceived team support. A hand-collected multiple-respondent dataset of 212 top managers from 45 Belgian family firm TMTs shows a positive relationship between familiness and decision-making quality, mediated by the level of perceived team support. Moreover, we find that familiness decreases the level of emotional dissonance experienced by these top managers.