Image and reputation of family firms: a systematic literature review of the state of research

TLDR

Family firms’ unique characteristics, such as strong family involvement and identification with the business, make reputation building essential, and recent studies link reputation to organizational success and non‑financial goals like customer retention and social capital. This review inventories and structures existing research on family firms’ image and reputation. The authors conducted a systematic literature analysis of 73 journal articles across business fields, examining image and reputation in various theoretical and geographic contexts. The review synthesizes how the public perceives family firms, identifies influencing factors, actions, and impacts, and proposes a model to guide future research.

Abstract

The special characteristics of family firms, such as the owning family's involvement and control or its strong identification with the business, make creating and preserving a good reputation desirable. Recent studies confirm the positive influence of a firm's reputation on organizational success and non-financial goals, such as customer retention and social capital. The image and reputation of family firms have been the subject of numerous studies. Despite increasing research intensity, a comprehensive overview of this topic is still lacking. This work provides an inventory of and structure for extant research on the image and reputation of family firms. To this end, a systematic literature analysis has been performed, which includes 73 papers from scientific journals from various business fields. Image and reputation are discussed in different theoretical and geographical contexts. Moreover, this contribution summarizes the ways in which the public perceives family firms and existing influencing factors, courses of action and impacts; in a subsequent step, this work integrates these findings into a model that can serve as starting point for future research activities.