Stakeholder Support in Family Businesses

Many family businesses fail during succession and sometimes they do because the successor is not granted the legitimacy by primary stakeholders of the company. But what does it take to be a legitimate successor in the eyes of these audiences? Are there different dimensions of legitimacy? And if so, do different stakeholder groups value the different dimensions of legitimacy differently?

This book expands our knowledge of the origin and impact of a successor's legitimacy in family owned businesses after succession. By analyzing a successor's legitimacy on five dimensions, this work detects whether primary stakeholder groups' decisions, to continuously provide their resources to family businesses after succession, depend on their perceived legitimacy of the successor and differ depending on the group the stakeholder belongs to. This book helps to understand why some successors are more successful than others in reassuring important resources to the company. Moreover, it helps successor candidates to identify which information they should signal toward a particular stakeholder group and how much weight should be attached to different claims and expectations.

The findings of this book are based on an innovative paper-based policy-capturing analysis with family members, employees of family businesses and bankers. The participants of the experiment assessed more than 3,400 decisions to allocate further resources to the family business after succession depending on their legitimacy judgment.