Strategic Perspective-based Family Business Succession Issues

At present, most of the studies about family business carry through the point of agency or RBV, and they mainly focus on the "family" more than "business" . In recent years, some scholars such as Chrisman, Chua & Sharma have discovered the problem and begun to focus on the "business" , advocating researching family business on the basis of strategic perspective. The paper is about to discuss the factors influencing succession from strategic perspective.The succession process of family business includes three phases, namely the phase of Pre-entry to family business, the phase of Managing Entry and the phase of Taking Charge. In the phase from the second one to the third one, all kinds of factors affect successors and even determine which to be next CEO. The index "Rank of Successor" is used for illuminating the probability that the successor will be CEO of family business in this paper.The paper includes 11 factors influencing succession based on the literature, and has empirical study about the family business located in Xiaoshan region by the means of questionary. And then based on the analysis of the data from investigation, the paper has got 4 Core Factors affecting succession, namely Rivalry, Re-foundation, Competence and Profession. The factors of Rivalry, Re-foundation and Profession resist the succession, while the factor of Competence promotes it. The paper then builds a Model of 4 factors for Rank based on the discovery in the former, and presents a function to indicate the relationship between Rank of Successor and the 4 Core Factors. These form the theory of 4 Factors for Rank in this paper. At last, the paper makes use of the model to discuss the influencing process in family business of three different developing phase and bring forward some suggestions to help the successors face these influence.