A Study Of Generation Conflict In China Family Business Based On Successor Perspective

In China, most of family businesses were founded in the1980s. After30years of development, the family businesses have become an important part of our society. Meanwhile, as the age of owners is increasing, the family business succession has become a hot topic in business and academic field. This study based on research found that the successors’ experience of growing up, like dealing with generation conflict, was crucial to the family business succession.This study conducted in-depth interviews to8family successors with an education training institute, and finally chose5typical cases for study. This study aims to analyze the influence factors about successor’s self-efficacy and filial culture’s effect on the relationship between self-efficacy and conflict strategy. The result found that, individual factors are closely related with self-efficacy, like knowledge skill, business skill, interpersonal skill and mental quality. Interpersonal skill has a big influence on successor’s self-efficacy and business skill was the next. And environmental factors also have effect on successor’s self-efficacy, like parenting styles and social factors. Parenting styles have influence on successor’s early self-efficacy and social factors have effect on successor’s late self-efficacy. And it found that successor’s conflict management styles were affected by self-efficacy level. Successor with high level self-efficacy would adopt positive and win-win strategy, successor with low level self-efficacy would adopt compromising, accommodating and avoiding strategy. Besides, the successor’s cognitive level of filial culture was acting a moderating role between self-efficacy and conflict management styles.