"Ownership obliges": Family businesses are therefore often regarded as the "better" employers, and this is how family businesses like to see themselves. Because they think and plan for the long term and place great value on a "good working atmosphere" or "cooperative management style". More focus on human concerns and a sense of proportion instead of thinking purely in terms of quarterly figures, the renunciation of outside capital is a virtue and shareholder value thankfully only applies to 'the' corporations. That is the thesis. But does the picture stand up to scrutiny?

A joint research project by the Berlin School of Economics and Law and the University of Trier has investigated this. According to the definition of the Institute for SME Research (Bonn), family businesses are companies that are more than 50% family-owned and have at least one family member in management. The companies examined in the analysis each generate an annual turnover of at least 200 million euros.

The myth of the good patriarch

Result: The positive (self-)image of these large family businesses is possibly a myth, as they lag behind non-family businesses as employers in all work dimensions and perform slightly worse.

The lowest levels of satisfaction were found in the categories of communication, career and supervisor behavior. However, family businesses also lag behind in terms of colleague cohesion, working atmosphere, equality, career and further training and work-life balance.

Concentration of power in one person

For the analysis, the economists evaluated around 198,000 published employee reviews on the employer review platform kununu.com; a total of 788 companies were examined and reviews of family businesses were compared with those of non-family businesses.

"As employers, larger family businesses also cultivate the self-image of 'medium-sized companies'," says Michael Graffius from HWR Berlin: "They adorn themselves with the attributes of small companies ('We take care of our employees'), although the structures have long since changed."

His colleague Christopher Hansen from the University of Trier adds: "On the one hand, it may be true that the contact between employees and company management is often more personal due to a long history of working together. On the other hand, however, many family businesses are also very patriarchal due to the high concentration of power in the person of the owner-manager."

If the family withdraws from operational management, the two researchers have found that the differences between large family businesses and non-family businesses become smaller again.