Family Firm Succesion Process: Informal Competency Transfer Study Between Top Leaders - Longitudinal Study Of Two Industrial Companies

Family firms have a very heavy economic weight in the entire world. Indeed, they seem to play an important role in the global economy as they account for from 50 to 90% of free market economies as a whole (Kenyon-Rouviniez & Ward, 2004). In fact, other scholars previously showed that large family companies which are run by successors, have often times experienced keeping up with the same performance as their predecessor (Anderson & Reeb, 2003). However, this competency transfer is a tricky topic as most competencies are informal, and cannot be transferred as simply as technical skills are. According to H. Savall, V. Zardet and M. Bonnet (2009), family firms have rarely developed an efficient competency transfer system. Thus, this is extremely risky as their vital know-how is not capitalized for its future transfer to the next generations. In addition, there is a high rate of succession failures. "Only a small percentage of family firms survive the transition to the second generation, and intergenerational transitions usually fail soon after the second generation" (Davis & Harveston, 1998) (Handler, 1990) (1992) (Morris, Williams, Allen, & Avila, 1997) (Sonnenfeld, 1988) (Ward, 2004, 1997). For all these reasons, we consider that transmission is the major problem family companies have to cope with and that "such attention is important because of the role family firms play in the global economy and the difficulties involved in intra-family succession" (De Massis, Chua, & Chrisman, 2008).