Authors: Ghadir Dhelal, Krenare Braha and Tom Delacroix
Course: Family Business
Tutor: assoc. prof. Müydelen Yenem
Summary:
Through this essay, we had an overview of the subject of family business, especially concerning the leadership and the sibling rivalry. We have to keep in mind that a family business is not necessarily a small business; indeed, it can be a huge company where family are just like owner.
In our first part we deal about the leadership. Remind that the leadership is about inspiring, persuading, involving and motivating people in order to improve the human resources of a company. But in a family business, we saw that there are three different ways of practicing the leadership: the democratic, autocratic and bureaucratic methods. Moreover, we can define that the autocratic method was more used in the past or in the developing country. Today, the democratic method is more usual, with the weakening of the father’s role.
Then we described the 6 different leadership roles possible in a family business. These different roles are depending on the work the leader do, and if he is more passive or active.
The second part was used to introduce the sibling rivalry inside a family business. This subject represents an important problem, because unsuccessful transfers of ownership are one of the most common causes of bankruptcies. Sibling rivalry can be split up into two distinct categories, emotional or strategic rivalries. Emotional rivalry is about a self-esteem problem whereas strategic rivalry is more a conflict over business styles and strategies. One of the biggest problem in the generation change, it requires that the entrepreneur puts business interests ahead of family interests and planning the switching between both generation long-time before. Another possibility is to mix generations during short term to insure a safe change. Finally, we explained the