Central issues of family business are treated in Chapter 4. It is widely assumed that in establishing a new business family members are preferred employees as they are trusted. As it expands a business increasingly employs non-family members. In these circumstances kinship forms of address, irrespective of kin status, create familiarity and closeness. A significant literature reports that by these means pseudo-kinship or quasi-familial relations are formed in order to cultivate trust with non-kin individuals. Chapter 4 challenges these assumptions. It is shown, firstly, that among family members, rather than trust a number of other factors, including compliance with role obligations as well as monitored forms of reliability, xinyong and face considerations, govern relationships and authority structures. Secondly, as non-kin employees are recruited to a family business neither pseudo-kinship nor quasi-familial relationships are assumed nor market exchange relations engaged; rather, non-kin members of family firms are subject to an intentionally cultivated emotionalized guanxi relationship with the company. This arrangement means that intra-firm relations operate in conjunction with market relations in order to elicit obligatory feelings and maintain them, generating firm-specific social bonds between management and employees as well as between employees.

This chapter describes positive interpersonal processes: interactions between people that actively enhance their close relationships. It begins by describing the field’s shift toward studying positive processes and highlighting the utility of considering positive phenomena as unique from negative phenomena. Then, it reviews three interpersonal behaviors that have been shown to enhance relationships and describes the evidence supporting their benefits. First, spending time together (particularly spending time on novel and exciting activities) enhances relationships by enabling partners to meet their self-expansion needs in ongoing relationships. A second positive process is co-experiencing positive emotions, such as joy, amusement, and excitement, which augment and sustain positive experiences and facilitate interpersonal synchrony. Finally, this chapter reviews the benefits of communicating affection and the individual differences in how and how often people express affection.