Chapter 10: A Social Exchange Perspective on the Ethical Context in Family Firms

In this chapter, we discuss the concept of the organizational ethical context, with specific emphasis on the family firm. After briefly reviewing the extant family firm literature on the topic, we draw upon social exchange theory to present a process model that describes how a strong family vision and generalized social exchange within the dominant coalition of a family firm can create a family firm ethos of trust, which we regard as the key meso-level construct linking the ethical context in the family firm to positive employee responses and outcomes.