Succeeding a family business in a transition economy: is this the best that can happen to me?

Abstract

Purpose

Family business successors have three career options. They may find a job, start their own business or join their family business and eventually take it over. This broadens the scope of a common entrepreneurial dilemma of whether to start a new venture or seek hired employment. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the problem from multiple angles in two different socio-political environments.

Design/methodology/approach

A survey was conducted among senior students in 34 countries with 109,000 participants. Several influencing variables such as family business background, motivation for self-employment, university environment and family business performance were defined. The used multinomial logistic regression with categorical three-dimensional independent variable allows to capture the complexity of an individual’s approach to career choice intention taking into consideration family business performance, personal motives for self-employment and university support for entrepreneurship.

Findings

All hypotheses include succession intention as a central category. There is significant correlation between friendly and supportive environment for entrepreneurship at university and the successor’s career choice. Performing family business is positively connected with the succession preference compared to the other two career alternatives. In the market economy group, students, who attended at least one entrepreneurial course, exhibit a significant preference for succession compared to employment. Male students are more likely to choose succession career than employment and founding a new own venture than succession. Students with family business background exhibit significant preference towards succession.

Originality/value

Some EU countries have a common denominator of almost 50 years of communist regime experience, which broke the entrepreneurial tradition and for a couple of decades prolonged the development the market economy. The value of the study is in the model comparison of transition and market based economies in the EU.

Citation

Ljubotina, P. and Vadnjal, J. (2017), "Succeeding a family business in a transition economy: is this the best that can happen to me?", Kybernetes, Vol. 46 No. 8, pp. 1366-1385. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-06-2016-0148