Study On The Internal Influencing Factors Of Incumbent’s Succession Willingness In Family Business Succession

As an organizational form of enterprises, family business has a long history of development. Since the reform and opening, family business has been an engine of China’s economy and social development. That’s why scholars are so interested in the research on family business and pay high attention to this field. In recent years, Family business in China is reaching a peak of succession, which undoubtedly, has highlighted the significance of studying the factors that influence succession in family business. In this situation, family business researchers should think carefully which factors can make effect on incumbent’s and successor’s willingness in succession, thus influence the succession process and result.Considering above issue, in this paper, internal factors that influence incumbent’s willingness in succession are studied from the perspective of incumbent in family business. The existed researches mostly focus on studying the successor’s willingness in succession and its influencing factors from the perspective of successor, but have ignored the study of incumbent’s succession willingness. In this paper, several internal factors are considered to affect the succession willingness of incumbent, namely, incumbent factor, family factor and trust factor. On this basis, an internal influencing factors model of incumbent’s succession willingness in family business is built and the research hypothesis is rasied. After that, this paper chooses incumbents from family businesses as study objects and does empirical research in order to add some referable value to succession in China family business.This paper starts with the presentation of research background and significance. After reviewing the related literature from home and abroad, the research model is built and the variable measuring items are identified by means of referencing other’s achievements and investigating into the family business. In data analysis process, after doing an servey on 147 incumbents from family businesses using questionnaires, this paper use SPSS17.0 to verify the hypothesis model and analyze the verified results, thus get following conclusions:(1) incumbent factor makes obvious effect on incumbent’s succession willingness;(2) family factor influences incumbent’s succession willingness significantly;(3) trust factor has positive effects on incumbent’s succession willingness;(4) family factor can influence incumbent’s succession willingness directly and indirectly. Family factor can influence incumbent’s succession willingness through incumbent factor, which means incumbent factor acts as the mediator between family factor and incumbent’s succession willingness.Based on empirical research results, this paper accordingly provides some countermeasures and suggestions for family business incumbents and leaders to help them better cope with the succession issues, thus improving succession performance and success possibility of succession to promote the healthy and sustainable development of family business in China.