Abstract
To ensure business continuation, Family Businesses (FBs) need to have in place succession plans and successor selection processes timely. The succession debate is one of the most researched areas in FB, but studies have mostly focused on incumbent or successor points of view. The process of successor selection involves choosing a new leader by the family business owner or members, independently of third-party approval, even though the literature suggests employees’ perception, acceptance, participation, and influence are significantly in ensuring smooth leadership transition and employee commitment to strategic decisions. Employee perception has been extensively examined in the business literature and several theories offer explanations for the preferences of employees. Most of those theories aim to explain preferences of employees in terms of gender. For instance, Social Role Theory (Eagly and Wood, 1991) examines how gender roles influence the behaviours and help to understand how employees perceive leaders based on their gender. Perry, Davis-Blake and Kulik’s (1994) gender-based selection theory explains the determinants of gender-based selection decisions with an integrated cognitive and contextual perspectives. The Role Congruity Theory (Eagly and Karau, 2002) suggests that employees often judge how effective a leader is based on how well they think the leader's gender matches the qualities typically associated with good leadership. Schein et al.'s (1996) study titled "Think Manager-Think Male: A Global Phenomenon" indicates that both males and females tend to believe that effective managers typically have traits and attitudes that are more commonly associated with men rather than women. This article makes a unique contribution to the FB literature by extending the gender preferences that have been developed in the management and the physiological literature to the examination of gender and other preferences in the FBs. This study demonstrates the importance of kinship, gender, educational background, and professional experience of both successors and employees in the acceptance and smooth transition of female successors within family businesses. The research investigates the factors to understand how they contribute to the dynamics of leadership succession and the facilitation of a supportive environment for women taking on leadership roles in a family business context. This dual-focused study will examine the relative impact of these changes among fifty-two family business employees in nine countries, providing insights into successor leadership development and factors affecting the acceptance of successor women and their preference for family businesses.