Nadine Kammerlander

Bird, Miriam ; Kammerlander, Nadine: . : N/A2015. - BCERC. - Babson, S. N/A.

The founder’s values and beliefs are often determinant for family business’ later organizational path and as such affect the organization’s level of innovation. Building on recent research that has identified storytelling as an important means to imprint the founder’s values and beliefs, we apply a multi-case research design to investigate how different foci of those stories affect a family firm’s level of innovation. We suggest that founder-centered stories entail a focus on decisions that match with the founder’s values, hierarchical decision-making, and destructive conflicts, which ultimately lead to low levels of innovation. To the contrary, family-centered stories free family members in their decision-making and entail a collaborative decision-making characterized by low levels of conflicts. As a result, those firms have higher levels of innovation as compared to firms with founder-centered stories. We summarize our findings in a model of path creation in family firms.

Family business succession is a crucial and challenging process, during which incumbents and successors increasingly build on the support of advisors. Based on qualitative data gathered from five small- and medium-sized companies, we aim to explore the different roles an advisor assumes along the four phases – trigger, preparation, selection and training – of the succession process. This study makes three contributions to the literature. First, we outline how the role of the advisor adjusts over time – from an initializer to a process planer to a task supporter to finally that of a coach – and thereby supports him or her in serving both, incumbent and successor. Second, we show how the different roles of the advisor and the corresponding activities affect the emotions of incumbent and successor in each phase of the process either positively or negatively. Finally, we suggest that full role adjustment of the advisor supports the incumbent and the successor in adjusting their own roles which ultimately has a positive effect on the outcome of the succession process.