Abstract
By integrating insights from two seemingly disparate literatures – economics and organizational justice – within the general agency framework, we advance propositions that suggest a fine-grained explanation of agency costs at family firms. In so doing, we account for the differential effects of the controlling owners’ self-control (i.e. the governance mechanisms they adopt and how they administer those mechanisms) on the justice perceptions of the family and non-family employees. Our integrative view allows us to strike a realistic balance between the overly optimistic views about family firm governance that have been expressed by agency scholars and the overly pessimistic views expressed by management scholars in the past few years.