Abstract
Drawing on three prominent views about the “self” and the self's relationship with “others”, a typology of five parental altruistic archetypes is derived that exhausts the possible altruistic influences on the governance of family firms. When taken in concert, these five types comprise a more balanced explanation of the cross-sectional variance in the governance efficiency of these firms than do the explanations from agency theory and more recently, by Schulze and colleagues. Therefore, the typology provides an improved explanation of why some family firms are more able than others to capitalize on the family governance's positive attributes.