Family-owned businesses account for 59% of the U.S. private workforce, with 35% of Fortune 500 companies being family-owned. Although family-owned firms employ more than half of the U.S. workforce, little is known about their operations due to the secretive nature of their corporate governance.

When it comes to leadership succession, it's well-known that family-owned firms tend to "keep it in the family" to ensure control and loyalty among other reasons, but some situations arise when non-family CEOs are considered the best successors. But are there differences in the accountability standards to which non-family CEOs are held compared to those applied to family CEOs?

"We expect non-family CEOs to be treated differently than family CEOs, but we wanted to identify the difference and at what stage in the CEO's tenure the difference becomes more pronounced," said Cecilia Gu, associate professor of international business at Georgia State University's J. Mack Robinson College of Business.

To answer that question, Gu and a team of academic researchers analyzed 20 years of data from a sample of family-owned firms in Taiwan spanning 1995–2015, looking at how family CEOs were measured on financial performance compared to non-family CEOs across different stages of CEO tenure.

Eighty percent of firms in Taiwan are controlled by founding families, with many led by non-family CEOs. The sample analyzed by Gu and team included 532 family-controlled firms, examining the tenure of 680 non-family CEOs and 674 family CEOs.

• Read More