Assessing Readiness to Family Firm Succession : Lessons from Insist Project

Poland, as other post-communist transforming economies from Central and Eastern Europe, has a relatively short experience with family firm's development. The historical discontinuity in private sector is due to communist rule in 1945-1989: in that period most of the private (including family) businesses were closed and private entrepreneurial activity was banned. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the principles of a free-market economy were re-established in the region. Consequently, the expansion of the private sector in the early 1990s was the main driving force in the economic development of Poland and an entire CEE region. In the development of the private sector, one of the crucial players were and still are the family firms. Now, almost 30 years after the start of the economic system transition, many founders of such enterprise face the challenge of a first successful succession within the family business. One of the still under-explored areas in the studies on family firms and on the research on family business succession in particular, is the level of the preparedness and the readiness of the new generation to take the lead over the family business. In our explorative study, we investigate the willingness of the potential successors to take over the family firm in the population of students. We find a relative reluctance to family firm succession among female respondents, while the average size of the firm is associated with a greater attractiveness of the succession