A Psychological Perspective Applied to Family Business: The Relationship between Emotions and Performance

This article examines how individual’s emotions could be put in relation with the businesses’ performance of a family firm, with the goal of developing future research and a better understanding of family business. Starting from psychological literature in order to identify emotions that generally affect the behavior of people, we have linked them with the existent literature on family business. Emotion may deeply influence the individual choices into a family business. Individual could act irrationally, being subject to emotional factors and would get the best for himself and his family in place of the business.The result of our analysis is a conceptual framework that describes how emotions are the “fil rouge” between the family and the business, provides an insight into family choices and encourage a new research opportunity