The purpose of this study is to analyze the moderating effects of family ownership and management on the relationship between corporate governance improvement efforts and financial performances. For the study, I defined family company as 'the company ...
The purpose of this study is to analyze the moderating effects of family ownership and management on the relationship between corporate governance improvement efforts and financial performances. For the study, I defined family company as 'the company which family shareholding exceeds 50 percent or the company which family members are listed as registered directors'. On the basis of the definition, Korean companies were classified into family and non-family companies. Also, family companies were classified into family CEO and professional CEO companies. Using data on 378 companies listed on the Korea Stock Exchange, I performed the mean difference analysis and the multiple linear regression analysis to investigate the effects of family ownership and management.
The results are as follows.
First, family controlled firms are less efficient than non-family firms in terms of financial performance, and the family control reduces the positive effects of the corporate governance improvement efforts. These results show that the interests of family controling shareholder conflict with those of general small shareholders so that family firms may be in the face of low financial performance.
Second, family CEO firms face lower financial performance than professional CEO firms. Also, family CEO system reduces the effects of corporate governance improvement efforts on the financial performance. This result implies that family CEOs have a negative impact on corporate performance and corperate governance improvement because they easily take on CEO position through succession so that they may be lazy to acquire professional knowledge unlike professional CEO who is competent with professional knowledge.
Third, group companies (which belong to business group) have lower financial performance than non-group companies, and they also affect the corporate governance improvement efforts negatively. These results indicate that behaviors of group companies such as tunneling and propping are weakening the effects of efforts to improve corporate governance.
Realistically, many Korean family firms belonging to big business groups are used to do unfair trade practices such as pyramid schemes, circulating financing structures, and propping and tunneling, resulting in a negative impact on financial performance. Therefore, in order to eradicate the unfair practices of family companies and to improve financial performance, it is necessary to improve complex ownership structure through conversion to pure holding company, and to establish independence of board and monitoring organization for effective monitoring activities.