The Impact of Incentive Compensation on Labor Productivity in Family and Nonfamily Firms

Family and nonfamily firms both must align owner and employee interests. However, family firms may experience lower labor productivity because of adverse selection problems from labor market sorting and attenuation. Incentive compensation reduces alignment of interest problems in family and nonfamily firms. Importantly, incentive compensation signals to potential employees that performance will be rewarded, which should improve the relative labor productivity in family firms by reducing adverse selection. Analysis of matched data on 216,768 firms supports our hypotheses, implying that incentive compensation has a broader impact on firm performance than commonly recognized in the family firm or human resource literatures.