Executives in family firms are often confronted with emotionally loaded issues, in part due to the need to include the interests of the owning family. Given this context, we hypothesize how high family-firm performance is affected by the emotional intelligence (EI) of a family-based CEO and top-management team (TMT), in addition to the CEO's transformational leadership (TFL) and TMT's behavioral integration. Survey measures were taken from a random sample of 72 CEOs of German family firms and 245 members of their TMTs. We found that TMT behavioral integration mediates between CEO TFL and objective firm performance while CEO EI is significantly related to both CEO TFL and TMT EI. Implications are discussed for future research thereby suggesting an extension to upper-echelon theory.

家族企业的高管经常面临情绪化的问题，部分原因是需要考虑拥有家族的利益。在此背景下，我们假设家族企业的 CEO 和高层管理团队 (TMT) 的情商 (EI) 以及 CEO 的变革型领导 (TFL) 和 TMT 的行为整合如何影响家族企业的高绩效. 调查措施是从德国家族企业的 72 名 CEO 及其 TMT 的 245 名成员中随机抽取的。我们发现 TMT 行为整合在 CEO TFL 和客观公司绩效之间起中介作用，而 CEO EI 与 CEO TFL 和 TMT EI 显着相关。讨论了对未来研究的影响，从而提出了对上层理论的扩展。