Perceived Parental Care and Next-Generation Family Members’ Succession Intentions: The Sequential-Mediating Role of General Self-Efficacy and Perceived Person-Job Fit

Whereas the existing literature on the relationship between parental behavior and family business succession mainly focuses on parental behavior in the business domain, we highlight the importance of parental behavior in the family domain. Integrating attachment theory, the family business succession literature, and person-job fit literature, our study proposes a theoretical framework hypothesizing that general self-efficacy and perceived person-job fit mediate the association between perceived parental care (an underrepresented family-domain-specific parental behavior) and next-generation family members’ succession intentions. This framework is tested by data from two surveys and further verified by qualitative interviews of next-generation family members. Multivariate analysis results suggest that next-generation family members’ general self-efficacy and perceived person-job fit played a sequential-mediating role in the relationship between perceived parental care and next-generation family members’ succession intentions. Our interviews not only confirm these results but also reveal new insights, particularly into the specific Chinese context in the study of family business succession. 家长的行为如何影响家族企业传承？当前的大部分文献主要关注的是家长在企业领域的行为，而忽视了他们在家庭领域的行为。本文通过整合依恋理论、家族企业继承文献和个人-工作匹配文献，提出了一个新的理论框架，假设家长在家庭领域对子女的关爱会通过两个机制影响下一代家族成员的继承意向：一个是他们的自我效能感，另一个是他们感知到的个人-工作匹配程度。我们做了两个问卷调查，还对21位下一代家族成员进行了定性访谈，结果都支持了这个新的理论框架。