Your Path Lies Before You – A Review on Succession in Family Firms and a Way Ahead

Abstract

Within the last decades, research on family firm succession has grown significantly. The current publication landscape is characterized by a heterogenic succession understanding, resulting from various models, surrounding contexts, and numerous outcomes. We aim to identify core elements of succession within family businesses and to derive potential modes of conflation. To address our research questions, we conduct a systematic literature review on family firm succession. During our analysis, we identify two core research streams: succession candidates and process models. We reveal the distinction of family and non-family successors within four groups of antecedents, both being connected to resulting implications on performance and socioemotional wealth. Besides, we identify the continuous modification of succession process models, resulting in various understandings of the succession procedure. Through comparative analysis, we reveal the succession processes to consist of three universal phases. Based on our review, we propose a framework to integrate the successor implication antecedents as explanatory variables within succession processes. We suggest the antecedents to represent the central content parameters. They essentially provoke and shape the resulting gatekeeping events. We argue the interrelation of the three phases, their contents, and the gatekeepers to result in the emergence of successor implications.