Colloquium: Xu Huang, Hong Kong Baptist University

Date: Wednesday, January 30, 2019

Time: 13:30

Location: room 5419-0107 (Kapteynborg)

Title:

Shadow of the prince: parent-incumbents' coerive control over child-successors in family organizations

Abstract:

During family firm succession, parent-incumbents are often caught up in a paradox of both empowering and dominating their child-successors. To address this recurring phenomenon, we draw from socioemotional wealth literature (Gómez-Mejía et al., 2011) and Girard’s (1977) philosophical account for the power-transfer paradox in ancient patriarchal monarchies to predict that parent-incumbents tend to exert generational coercive control when their child-successors are seen as very unwilling/incapable or very willing/capable of taking over patriarchal family organizations. In Study 1, we coded data from succession cases in Chinese patriarchal monarchies (403 BC to 959 AD) and conducted regression analyses, which revealed a U-shaped relationship between father kings’ perceptions of successor princes’ willingness (63 cases) and capability (80 cases) and the kings’ coercive control (persecuting or murdering the princes). In Study 2, we obtained survey data from parent-child dyads of 157 contemporary family firms in Taiwan and southern China, and again, we found U-shaped main effects of child-successors’ willingness and capability on parent-incumbents’ coercive control (restraining successors’ power). Moreover, parent-incumbents’ high narcissistic personality attenuated these U-shaped relationships. In Study 3, we conducted a survey of 103 parent-child dyads in family firms in China and found a U-shaped relationship between capability and coercive control only when incumbents were high in family-work role integration.