The purpose of this article is to provide an explanation for
the contradictory findings about the links between private family
businesses (FBs) and organisational performance. The paper suggests that
lone founder firms determine the results by explaining the comparative
performance of different private FBs and NFBs. In addition, we develop a
parsimonious typology of private FBs that exploits the interactions of
the components of family involvement to show that firms that achieve to
avoid or minimize traditional agency conflicts tend to outperform the
firms that do not. It appears that the use of ownership dispersion as a
governance mechanism shepherds and monitors performance progress, and the
conflict between large and minority shareholders seems to be more costly
than the conflict between owners and managers
