The main objective of this research is to analyze how specific characteristics of an organizational culture can impact the performance of an family enterprise. The motivation and importance of this work comes from the fallacy that family companies present lower performance than professional ones, so they will always fail. Supported by a literature revision on culture, organizational cultures, organizational culture characteristics, its evolution and typologies and mainly on recent works about family companies and their specific characteristics, a theoretical basis was built to get the mentioned objective. In order to analyze the problem under a managerial perspective and adopting a case study methodology, the company Ceras Johnson Ltda. was chosen to analysis and research. Johnson, one century family company, is leader in almost all categories in which it involved, that is mainly commercializing hygienic and cleaning products. This business industry is extremely competitive, imposing a strong dynamism to the companies that take part of it. Besides of a documental research to the characterization of the Ceras Johnson s culture and evaluation of its particular characteristics linked to its familiar origin, the field research consisted of interviews with managerial level employees. These interviews tried to identify the leader s vision about the cultural characteristics of the company and how these leaders link them to the latest results. The analysis of the theoretical basis and the case study made possible to reject the premise that the performance of a family business is lower than the performance of professional companies because of cultural reasons. As a conclusion, the present study will stimulate the development of policies and rules that will help leaders to understand what may contribute or not to the development of their companies.