Friends or Foe?Unravelling the role of familiness in promoting business ethics in the workplace

Scholars have argued that business ethics is a crucial ingredient for the successful recipe of human resource management. However, little is known about the factors that trigger an organizational commitment towards the promotion of an ethical approach in crafting human resource management practices. This is especially true for family firms, whose ethical slant in devising human resource management practices has been under-researched. This chapter intends to push forward our knowledge in the field of business ethics investigating the role of familiness in determining ethically-rooted human resource management practices among small and medium-sized enterprises. More specifically, the authors investigated how awareness of business ethics issues and formalization of human resource management policies and practices affect the SMEs commitment to ethics. Family firms were found to be aware of the ethical challenges that characterize human resource management; however, no evidence was retrieved about the role of familiness in triggering an ethical commitment in managing human resources.