Small Business Research Centre seminar: Listening to the heart or the head? Exploring the willingness vs. ability

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Time: 1.00pm - 2.00pm
Venue: Room 3022, Business School, Kingston Hill campus, Kingston Hill, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT2 7LB
Price: free
Speaker(s): Dr. Melanie Richards (University of Bath)

Please join the Small Business Research Centre for the first research seminar of the new year, where we welcome Dr Melanie Richards (University of Bath).

Selecting a successor from within the family often creates a decision-making dilemma for incumbent owner-managers. Incumbents ideally seek a highly committed and at the same time highly competent child as successor, yet such a candidate is often not available. Rather, family successors often exhibit lower than desired levels of commitment or competence. Extant literature is unable to predict which of the desired attributes of a potential family successor—commitment (ie. willingness) or competence (ie. ability)—is most important in this succession dilemma. Drawing from the institutional logics literature, we suggest that the lifetime experiences, education, and cultural environment of the incumbent as well as situational stimuli within the firm direct incumbent attention to either the corporate logic, favoring ability, or the family logic, favoring commitment, to guide decision-making in the succession dilemma. We use policy capturing to test our hypotheses, drawing on responses of 1,060 family firm owner-managers, and contribute to research on succession, family firms, and institutional logics. 

Dr Melanie Richards is Senior Lecturer in Family Business at the School of Management, University of Bath. Prior to joining the University of Bath, Melanie was a Lecturer in Management at the University of Bristol and a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Family Business at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. She held a 12 month visiting position at Cass Business School, City University London. Next to her academic career she worked as a management consultant for PwC in London. She is an advisory board member of the Annual Sustainability, Ethics and Entrepreneurship (SEE) Conference. Her research focuses on corporate social responsibility, entrepreneurship and innovation in family firms and has been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Management Studies, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, the Journal of Product Innovation Management and the Journal of Business Venturing.

All are welcome.

For further information about this event:

Contact: Dr. Hang Do
Email: H.Do@kingston.ac.uk