Professional trilemma of students with family business experience

Abstract

Purpose

Family businesses represent the largest share of small-sized firms in majority of economies around the world. Having in mind the global economic situation this trend is expected to be continued. With the goal of better understanding of the process of transferring the business to the next generation, which ensures a long-term success, the purpose of this paper is to investigate expectations of student’s with family business background.

Design/methodology/approach

The research addresses the issue of an individual’s perception of entrepreneurship and the related factors that influence individual’s decision on whether to build a career as an employee, become a successor of family business or start own business as an independent entrepreneur. The authors separately analyzed West European (data from another study), East European and Slovenian senior student population for the purpose of comparative study. Students were surveyed and binominal regression was used for statistics.

Findings

The results show differences between investigated populations and positions Slovenian students in the mean. The authors anticipate that differences are caused by historical, cultural and educational backgrounds. This challenging area is raising a lot of sub-questions for possible future research.

Originality/value

The value of the study is in the replication of the existing methodology from the benchmarking study and result comparison.

Citation

Vadnjal, J. and Ljubotina, P. (2016), "Professional trilemma of students with family business experience", Kybernetes, Vol. 45 No. 3, pp. 446-460. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-08-2014-0162