As the field of family business matures, research has focused on actors outside the owner family. The most important non-family member a family firm can hire is arguably a non-family CEO. Given the limited pool of family members, family firms regularly hire such actors, but our knowledge of them is fragmented. Using a systematic literature review, this article collects, organizes and structures current knowledge on the impact of non-family CEOs in family firms. I then propose a research agenda by engaging in ‘gapspotting’ and ‘assumption-challenging’, first outlining gaps in the existing literatures and proposing research questions to fill them, then identifying and problematizing three underlying assumptions in the literature. Finally, I develop alternatives to stimulate new research about non-family CEOs.

Interpersonal relationships are an important factor in organizations, and a growing number of articles examine how such relationships affect why people stay or leave organizations. In this article, we investigate how affective attachment between actors influences the turnover and retention process of non-family CEOs in family firms. By employing a social exchange perspective, we reveal under which conditions affective attachment come into being. We focus on the relationship between a non-family CEO and two generations of the owner family. Conceptualizing their relationship as an exchange triad, we show how imbalances influence the affective attachment created in this triad and outline the implications for turnover. Our article contributes to the literature on family businesses and turnover by linking the affective side of interpersonal relationships to CEO retention and turnover.

Family firms have long faced pressures to “professionalize” their business and even their owner family’s systems. However, how professionalization unfolds over time and what it means for the business and family systems are unclear. We combine literature on professionalization and practice adoption to investigate how family firms adopt professional practices and adapt them to the underlying family and business systems. Relying on a longitudinal single case study, we have followed the professionalization process in a family firm for over a decade. Our findings show how family firms utilize four distinct modes of professionalization to balance family and business needs with professional practice requirements. We observe and conceptualize how family firms “overprofessionalize” when they adopt practices with an excessive degree of extensiveness, fidelity, and synchrony and show how overprofessionalization can be especially harmful to the family system. Thus, our study contributes by critiquing professionalization and focusing on the systems for which practices are adopted.

One of the most prevalent elements shaping organizations is that of jobs and the systems they form. Building on the literature on job design, job crafting and their interplay, I investigate how job systems change during a reorganization. The findings show that job systems change through a contestation process between designing and crafting that undermines the existing job system while unintentionally creating a framework for an emerging job system. The emergent system stabilizes as employees increasingly accomplish work through that system. The article contributes to the literature on work design by investigating the interplay between job design and crafting and by outlining the consequences of crafting for job systems. The article further contributes to the understanding of the actors involved in job design and crafting, and it adds to the growing literature investigating the interplay of formal and informal structures.