The Committed and the Happy: Exploring the Effects of Justice and Ownership Perceptions among Non-family Employees

A main challenge that family businesses face is fostering non-family employees' val-ue-creating attitudes, such as affective commitment and job satisfaction. While justice perceptions have been identified as being critical in the creation of these outcomes, the process how they actually evolve is less clear, especially in family firms. We address this gap by introducing psychological ownership as a mediator in the relationships between justice perceptions (distributive and procedural) and common work attitudes (affective commitment and job satisfaction). Our analysis of a sample of 310 non-family employees from family firms in German-speaking Switzerland and Germany reveals that psychological ownership mediates the relationships between distributive justice and affective commitment as well as job satisfaction. This leads to valuable contributions to family business research, organizational justice and psychological ownership literatures, and to practice.