Abstract
China’s economy enjoyed a high speed development for the past 30 years, and so did the Chinese private enterprises. But with the passage of time, the first generation of the Chinese entrepreneurs gradually entered the age of sixty, and unable to meet the demand of high strength of the enterprise daily operation and management. Therefore, the succession is naturally becoming an important issue both for the enterprise and the family. Different from the western enterprises, Chinese private enterprise cannot easily achieve sustainable development for the following two reasons: (1) Chinese professional manager market isdevelopingandfar from mature in respect of both and professional seasons, and most importantly the owners are concerned about ethics aspect of their managers; (2) From the cultural perspective, the ‘blood-based’ relationship highly influence the selection of the successor, only the biologically related younger generation can be concidered as a legitimacy candidate which hinders the Chinese private enterprises from adopting the Japanese model. So far as we are acknowledged which is also evidenced by our interviews, it is seems that the capabilities of the younger generation might not be the ‘bottleneck’ as it is expected. This phenomenon can be partly explained by the fact that most of the younger generation have a sound education background. To our surprise, we find the value different might be an important problem in the succession process. Therefore, in our study, we addressed two research questions as: (1) What are the main differences in terms the value differences in the succession process? 2 will these value difference affects the perform of the succession both subjectively and objectively.As a scientific research, the first question that we encounter is: what is the value difference between the two generations of entrepreneurs in the succession process and how to measure it? Therefore, we conducted an exploratory research: we chose the six private enterprises in Zhejiang Province and interviewed it’s the founder and the successor respectively for about 1 hour with a semi-structural questionnaire. Based on the interview draft with contains 120 thousand Chinese characters, we use a grounded theory to analysis and conclude 3 dimensions of the value differences, namely time management philosophy, team management philosophy and management philosophy.
On the basis of our second stage exploratory case study, we designed a value difference measurement scale. With the help of Wenzhou Chamber of Commerce, we collected 196 valid questionnaires which contains 98 pairs of the founder and the successor of a Chinese private company. We conducted an empirical test of the conceptual model with these survey data, and found: Three dimensions of the value difference have a positive relationship with the subject performance of the company, while the relationship between three dimensions of value difference and the objective performance is not significant; (2) The degree of family harmony has a significant positive moderator effect on the relationship between three dimensions of value difference and the subjective performance, but not significantly moderate the relationship between three dimensions of value difference and the objective performance.
We contribute to the management theory in terms of investigate the succession issue in Chinese context from a value difference perspective. This is a cutting edge research, therefore, there are still a lot of space to be improved. Future research should pay more attention to the following two issues: (1) To develop a more accurate measurement scale of the value differences; (2) To sophistically identify the relationship between the value differences and objective performance. We believe that all these will provide valuable reference for the development of private economy in China.
| Date of Award | 12 Dec 2016 |
|---|---|
| Original language | Chinese (Traditional) |
| Awarding Institution |
|
| Supervisor | Kin Keung LAI (Supervisor) |
Cite this
- Standard