Non-family employees are an important resource in family firms; therefore, understanding their well-being is of utmost relevance for management theory. Integrating leadership theory into family business research, we draw from the emotional contagion and person-organization fit theories and argue that employee well-being in terms of organizational-level affective climate and individual-level job satisfaction is higher in firms managed by a family CEO. Moreover, we hypothesize that this relationship becomes stronger with higher levels of CEO transformational leadership and weaker with increasing CEO tenure. We test our hypotheses using a large-scale, multilevel dataset comprising 2,246 direct reports of the respective CEO and 41,531 employees from 497 family- and non-family-managed firms. By applying multilevel modeling, we found support for our proposed hypotheses. Post-hoc tests reveal that the positive effect of family management is particularly strong in first generation family firms. This article contributes to research on leadership and on family firms and advances the evidence-based debate about employees in those firms.
