The Successor Conundrum: A Moral Dilemma

The mission of family business successors is shaped in relation to the past. Successors are expected to protect past achievements and values, thus ensuring family business continuity. However, as new leaders, successors are also required to take responsibility for crafting the company’s future, thus triggering change. While navigating these contradictory expectations, successors find themselves confronted with a moral dilemma whose implications are strategic but also relational and emotional. Indeed, behind these apparent tensions between continuity and change, the incumbent-successor relationship is a power relationship, although acknowledging it as such is one of the last taboos of family firms. Successors are expected to accept the incumbent’s control along with the authority of family and business institutions and traditions. In most cases, successors are granted only limited autonomy. The successor’s moral dilemma cannot thus be sustainably resolved without addressing the surreptitious issue of family business succession: that of the successor’s emancipation from the incumbent’s power. Emancipation can be achieved by actively engaging with entrepreneurship with the support of the business family. This may offer the best possible answer to the successors’ moral dilemma: that of entrepreneurship at the heart of the business family’s past and future.