Notice of RetractionThe practice and effects of control mechanisms in Chinese family business

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

Family business researchers and practitioners have long been confused about the way of governing family managers in family firms, especially those under the influence of Chinese family culture. Agency theorists assume a self-interested nature of family managers and suggest imposing control mechanisms on them to improve performance. Stewardship theorists, however, believe a self-actualizing nature of family managers and argue against the use of control mechanisms. Based on a sample of 186 family businesses in China, this study investigates their ways of controlling family managers, and the effects of control mechanisms on firms´ performance. Our results indicate that family business owners in China adopt a series of control mechanisms on their family managers, and obtain higher performance by doing so. The findings empirically validate the assumptions of agency theory in the context of Chinese family business, thus suggesting the existence of agency relationship between Chinese family business owners and their family managers.