Beyond Owner Commitment: Exploring Employees’ Experience of Corporate Purpose in Family Firms

Family firms are often assumed to be more purpose-driven than nonfamily firms. In this study, we challenge this assumption by examining how family ownership shapes both the strength and distribution of purpose within organizations. We measure purpose as employees’ shared perceptions of work meaningfulness and analyze 86,205 employee-level observations from 177 firms participating in the Great Place to Work® survey, complemented with hand-collected data on governance structures, leadership configurations, and performance. Multilevel analyses reveal no systematic difference in average purpose between family and nonfamily firms. Instead, family firms are characterized by significantly greater within-firm variation regarding purpose. Our study makes three main contributions. First, we offer the first large-scale empirical analysis of corporate purpose in family firms. Second, we demonstrate how bifurcation bias shapes employees’ experience of corporate purpose. Third, we replicate and extend prior studies on purpose by introducing a new organizational context.