The way toward a new entrepreneurial balance in business succession processes

Alexander Pöschl · Jörg Freiling

14 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Organizational Change Management

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Family Business Performance and Succession Entrepreneurship Studies and Influences Human Resource and Talent Management

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the under-researched family-external business succession process. It makes use of entrepreneurship theory in order to conceptualize this temporal process. This allows for an operationalization of entrepreneurial functions and tracking them during the two main phases of such processes. This study provides a starting point for further endeavors into researching family-external succession processes. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on an explorative, quasi-longitudinal, qualitative and multiple case-study approach. It became possible to create trust with stakeholders in three family firms and to conduct face-to-face interviews with a total of 12 interviewees, generating over 300 transcript pages. The case interviews were validated through two expert interviews.A prioriresearch propositions were tested and modified, if deemed necessary. Findings Entrepreneurial functions during the two main phases of the process seem to be carried out and aligned depending on several influencing factors: delegation of responsibilities from owner-managers to qualified employees; incumbent owner-managers being heavily involved in the succession’s facilitation and neglecting some entrepreneurial functions; and as a result new owner-managers being forced to prioritize certain functions in the second phase. Originality/value This paper benefits from a rather unique access to three family firms undergoing succession in the DACH-region. Therefore, it became possible to study the family-external succession process by including various stakeholders involved. Such an inclusion of perspectives has been suggested by family business scholars for a long time.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

References

1991Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning 2007Theory Building From Cases: Opportunities And Challenges 2000The Promise of Entrepreneurship as a Field of Research 1984Structural Inertia and Organizational Change 2006The qualitative research interview 2002A theory of entrepreneurial opportunity identification and development 2000Organizational Routines as a Source of Continuous Change 1990Multiparadigm Perspectives on Theory Building

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.