Bifurcated HR practices in family firms: Insights from the normative-adaptive approach to stepfamilies

This paper seeks to stimulate additional research on a form of workforce differentiation specific to family firms: the asymmetric treatment of family versus nonfamily employees. Argued to be manifest within differential HR practices applied to each group, little is known as yet about the nature, prevalence, origins, and consequences of this 'bifurcation bias'. Our overarching thesis is that greater insight can be gleaned by considering family firms as analogous to stepfamilies, which we demonstrate by drawing upon work adopting a normative-adaptive approach to stepfamily research. A key contribution of our resultant interdisciplinary theory-building is a typology of different bifurcated HR practice bundles in family firms. We also develop propositions regarding (a) owning family characteristics that contribute to the various forms of bifurcation, (b) conditions under which the presumed dysfunctional consequences can be attenuated, and, (c) the functionality of a particular type that we term 'bivalent bifurcation'.