A Family Member or a Professional Manager? The Role of Trust in the Choice of <scp>CEO</scp> in Family Firms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using a sample of Chinese family firms from 2008–2015, we investigate the impact of trust on the choice of whether to hire a family member or a professional manager as CEO. We find that the presence of a professional CEO is negatively associated with a higher level of trust in family members. In contrast, it is positively associated with a higher level of trust in non‐family members. Our findings suggest that the trust mode in Chinese family firms is like the ‘differential mode of association’, which describes Fei's (1992) social structure of Chinese society. Moreover, a higher level of trust in family members is associated with native entrepreneurial activities, which strengthens the negative relationship between trust in family and the presence of a professional CEO. Furthermore, the role of trust in family firms’ appointment decisions is more pronounced in regions with relatively weak legal protection and firms with relatively poor governance. Our results hold when we control for endogeneity and after a series of robustness checks. This research links the governance of family firms to the informal institution of trust, enriching the literature on trust and family firm behaviours.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".