Family Business: Leadership and Succession

Abstract

Leadership can be defined as the process of influencing the activities of an organized group in its efforts towards goal setting and goal achievement. In family businesses leadership concerns two areas to which every leader addresses its forces: family and firm. How the family business leaders behave is the outcome of the forces exerted by these two areas, both of positive value. Moreover, considering that, in family firms, leadership is more transformational than it is in non-family firms, we can assume that many of the features traditionally assigned to family firms may be the consequence of a similar action and behaviour linked to the idea of transformational leadership that family firm leaders exert. Many of these features, that have been considered strong points by the literature on family firms, are of a cultural nature, and transformational leaders generally have an important part in creating and developing the set of values and all the other elements that describe the culture itself. Besides this, leadership in family business remains transformational regardless of the family generation which runs it.