Strategic plurality in intergenerational hand-over: Incubation and succession strategies in family ownership
Journal of Family Business Management
ISSN: 2043-6238
Article publication date: 23 November 2018
Issue publication date: 16 May 2019
Abstract
Purpose
With strategy-as-practice theory the authors explore successful business-owning families hand-over of roles to the next generation. The authors argue for the usefulness of strategy-as-practice theory in exploring the complexity and plurality of best practices in intergenerational hand-over. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
A cross-cultural in-depth case study with best practice cases from China, Germany, Sweden, England, Tanzania, Israel and the USA, based on in-depth interviews of family members and non-family employees.
Findings
The authors identified three different succession patterns: a “monolithic practice,” a distributed leadership hand-over, and active ownership with a non-family managing director/CEO. Two other types of hand-over practices were categorized as incubator patterns that formed a part of, or replaced, what we traditionally see as a hand-over of roles. Families would switch between these practices.
Research limitations/implications
Surprisingly, a monolithic succession practice (a one-company-one-leadership role) was rarely used. Quantitative and qualitative research should consider, as should advisors to family owners and family businesses, the plurality of succession practices. Education should explore a variation of succession and how the dynamic of gender influences the process.
Practical implications
Giving practitioners, such as research and practitioner, an overview of strategic options so as to explore these in a client or research case.
Social implications
Adding the notions that the family is an incubator for new entrepreneurship makes it possible to show how not only sector or public policy generate new ventures. That family as source of entrepreneurship has been well established in the field but it mainstream policy thinking the family is not seen as such a source.
Originality/value
The paper offers an integrative model of the complexity of hand-over practices of ownership and leadership roles. It shows how these practices are fundamental for understanding how a family’s ownership and their leadership of businesses and new entrepreneurship develops.
Keywords
Citation
Osnes, G., Hök, L., Yanli Hou, O., Haug, M., Grady, V. and Grady, J.D. (2019), "Strategic plurality in intergenerational hand-over: Incubation and succession strategies in family ownership", Journal of Family Business Management, Vol. 9 No. 2, pp. 149-174. https://doi.org/10.1108/JFBM-06-2018-0018
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited