An Empirical Study On The Family Business Successor Development Model

China’s family business is in the key moment of inheritance. However, only 30 percent of family businesses can pass on to the next generation. In this process, how to find and train talented and loyal successors is a top priority. Due to imperfect market of professional managers and traditional culture, the mode of " father-to-son" succession is still the main mode of family business. So,what kind of training methods should we choose? what kind of effects will these training methods have on succession performance ?Based on the theory of succession and successor development,this paper discovered successor training,as a key in succession progress,has certain impact on the performance of family business succession.This paper aims to find the relationship between successor training modes and family business performance, taking over the investigation of 101 family business successors’(second-generation entrepreneurs) experience before they inherit the business and about 278 senior executives of the current business condition. The main results are as follows:(1)Build a “3-experiences model”: academic training, qualifications training and experience culture, namely education, training within the corporate and social experience training.The internal corporate training includes joint venture type and rotation type; social experience including outside independent startup and learning experience in other companies.Meanwhile, according to the questionnaire,this paper made an empirical validation of the three categories of successors development modes.(2)Specifically, the degree of the successor to participate in formal education and training within the corporate is significantly greater than the external experience.(3)By variance analysis, we found that successor development model selection is affected by enterprise scale, production methods and founder features. Specifically, the larger the scale, labor-intensive enterprises more easily adopt joint venture and rotation training mode; technology-intensive companies tend to take a training model of social experience and elite education; less educated founder,farmers and workers are more inclined to take the rotation with the corporate training type and joint venture type; higher education founder, a former founder of cadres more inclined to take the social experience model(let successors do their independent business or work outside the family business).(4)The relationship between the successor development model and the performance of succession. The study found that inside experiences and education experience is positive to good objective succession performance;the external and internal training experiences have a significant positive impact on the subjective succession performance.