Shadow of the Prince: Parent-incumbents’ Coercive Control over Child-successors in Family Organizations

During family firm succession, parent-incumbents are often caught up in a paradox of both empowering and dominating their child-successors. To understand this recurring phenomenon, we draw from socioemotional wealth literature and a philosophical account of the power-transfer paradox in ancient patriarchal monarchies to hypothesize that parent-incumbents tend to exert generational coercive control when their child-successors are seen as very...