ABSTRACT
As with all enigmatic phenomena, it seems that the more we seek to understand and learn about the family business, the more questions are uncovered. Family businesses are enigmatic because they embody the union of individual, family and organisational psychology along with organisational behaviour and economics. This leads to an uneasy marriage of emotionality and rationality acted out in businesses and in family homes throughout the world, and to issues that are connected to power, money and love. In family businesses that have clear sense of family mission and strategic direction, the emotionality-rationality dilemma is managed through the ability of the family to communicate its goals, and through a governance structure designed to manage the inevitable conflicts of self-interest that will emerge from time to time. But when self-interests clash, or when there is no shared dream for the business, then the family business can become ‘stuck’ or face strategic drift. In the family, individuals begin to sense that unless something changes, it may not be feasible for the family business to be the place where career goals and other life aspirations can be achieved. Most often, what appears to members of the business-owning family as a satisfactory solution to a given business problem may seem to others like a messy, sub-optimal outcome that could lead to undesired consequences for others in the system. This can happen, for example, when the owning family selects a family successor to lead the business in the next generation in order to solve problems regarding continuity of family control. Life in the family business is a life of compromises and negotiations for all concerned. It can often lead to a life of subordination of one’s self-interest for the greater good of the family enterprise.
