Abstract
Family businesses balance performance with family, employee, and consumer needs, and they exist in most private and public sector areas. Although family businesses must continuously manage decisions that impact the never-ending succession task, we have limited knowledge of how multiple successions play out over time. Against this backdrop, we present an extreme case of how a family business, Kinsmith Finance, thrived through three successions; we focus on how the generations involved shaped the succession path using combinations of adapting to emerging circumstances and reinforcing decisions from previous generations. By adopting a case study design with three embedded succession cases, we examine the reoccurring events to uncover eight underlying decision patterns that shaped the overarching succession path. Together, these findings show how the family business used critical decision events to create and reinforce succession opportunities, in turn fostering successful successions across four generations. As a result, we provide an elaborate account of eight decades of family business evolution, offering novel insights into multi-generational succession.
Recommended Citation
Duckworth-Chambless, Toney and Mathiassen, Lars
(2024)
"Multigenerational Family Business Succession: An Extreme Case Study,"
Engaged Management ReView: Vol. 8
:
Iss.
1
, Article 2.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.28953/2375-8643.1134
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