Conflicts, its Mitigation and Resolution in a Family Business

Abstract

Family is emotions and business is about economics, both being in separable. It has to be the best combination of values, ethics, dedication and discrete potential offered by each family member. The case becomes challenging when the business transfers from generation to generation.Family businesses being fragile, the failure to adequately control conflict may contribute to the high mortality rate of family owned firms while it is said that roughly two-thirds of family-owned and family-controlled businesses do not survive the founder’s generation (Beckhard and Dyer, 1983; Dyer, 1986), with only 10 to 15 percent surviving to a third generation (Applegate 1994). The research is based on literature review on family business, conflict management, organisational issues, within family businesses. Content analysis on cases was carried on select family businesses.The results indicated that there was a mixed composition of “familiness”, the emotional and “business”, the economic component by most incumbent family businesses. The conflicts started from ownership, to power positions in organizational setup. Forces entries of sibling in the business with no competence besides the patriarchs’ distribution of business were of major concern.Hence, there is a dire need to professionalise. The study used an in depth analysis of published cases on the family business along with a detailed set of interviews to ascertain the management of conflict. Hence, future research may be expanded to multiple industry verticals and different geographies.Some Family businesses are not so successful as compared to others that are successful. Effective conflict management is the clear outcome of this imbroglio, which is explored and discussed in this research paper. Thereby clearly indicating, how conflict management integrated within the operational framework of the closely held family business is a must towards its growth.This paper has been built upon previous contributions on family businesses and conflict types and extended to focus on what are these conflicts and how are they being managed?