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Recent family business research has focused on transgenerational intent (TI)-the plan to pass management of the business to future generations-as a defining characteristic of family firms. We theorize that TI is influenced by the current leader's consideration of factors related to three subsystems (business, ownership, and family) that underlie the family business system. Specifically, we hypothesize that characteristics of the business (the age and size of the firm), the owners (gender and minority status), and the family, specifically the family's engagement in the firm (time until succession and the family's role in advising the CEO) influence the current leader's TI. Results based on a survey of over 700 family-managed firms are largely supportive of our hypotheses. Understanding what affects TI will help advance researchers' efforts to develop a theory of the family firm.
Key Words: family business, female, minority, succession, transgeneration.
Family firms are influential and unique in the business world. The 5.5 million family firms in the United States account for 63% of employment and 57% of GDP and create 75% of all new jobs (Kinkade, 2011). In addition to being important to national economies, family firms must not only satisfy numerous stakeholders such as employees, customers, suppliers, and the local communities in which they operate, but they also must deal with family issues and relationships (Chrisman, Chua, Pearson, & Barnett, 2012; Gómez-Mejía, Cruz, Berrone, & De Castro, 2011). For the family members involved in family firms, the business is not only the family's primary source of current income but also a major source of long-term wealth, both financial and socioemotional (e.g., ability to help family members, perpetuation of family values, and social capital; Gómez-Mejía, Haynes, Nunez-Nickel, Jacobson, & MoyanoFuentes, 2007). When the family business suffers, so does the family's current and future economic security.
We define family firms where the business is family managed and where there exist intentions to transfer management of the business within the family (Chua, Chrisman, & Sharma, 1999). Family management is a necessary but not sufficient characteristic of a family firm (Chua et al., 1999). It is the desire to pass the firm along to others in the family that defines the essence of the family firm. As noted by Wright and Kellermanns (2011), "Family firms...