Tacit Knowledge and Skills Transfer in a Family Business During Generational Succession

Abstract

The succession process remains a critical challenge in family businesses (Ramadani et al., 2015; Ramadani and Hoy, 2015), as this factor is connected to the low survival rate in the long term of the same. One of the reasons for this challenge may concern the successor's ability to adequately acquire the predecessor's silent and explicit knowledge and critical skills to maintain and improve the company's organizational performance. Much research focused on the successor profile (De Massis et al., 2008), highlighting the multiplicity of the skills requested. Recent studies show that the successor must have both hard and soft competence (Beeson, 2009). Hard skills refer to the technical skills related to work, cognitive skills, and traditional and learned skills (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 2006, Laker and Powell, 2011) or those objectively measurable and demonstrable skills, such as the ability to identify business opportunities, to develop a business vision, to create and manage business networks and their work (Bird and Jelinek, 1989; Chandler and Jensen, 1992; Charles-Pauvers et al., 2004, Laviolette, 2006). On the contrary, the transversal intangible and difficult-to-measure skills reflect "skills and traits that concern personality, attitude and behavior" (Moss & Tilly, 2001) as motivation, communication, team spirit, and trust in themselves.
 Pertanto è essenziale trovare strumenti pratici, data la scarsa letteratura sul tema, per trasferire silenziose conoscenze, abilità, legittimità e credibilità, che sono di fondamentale importanza per i membri della famiglia di nuova generazione (Le Breton-Miller et al. , 2004).
 Fatte queste premesse, il nostro lavoro mira a rispondere alle seguenti domande
 
 Quali sono gli strumenti di conoscenza tacita utilizzati nel trasferimento delle conoscenze?
 Quali di essi sono utili per trasferire le competenze?
 
 La metodologia di questo lavoro prevede la somministrazione di un colloquio semi-strutturato con aziende familiari che stanno vivendo il passaggio generazionale o lo hanno vissuto.