Cut or Close in? Examining Social Relations from Stakeholders Perspective Towards Family Business Success

Stakeholder social support is integral to the thriving of the succesors in a family business. The paper aims to develop an understanding about the provisions of social nudge that influence the support of stakeholders (viz., life partner, investor, community of entrepreneur, expert, venture partner and employee) towards the role of successor in the family business. Implicit in many discussions of congruence of gender roles and job roles is the idea of perceived incongruity between the female gender role and leadership roles. We address whether this intuition is supported by the empirical data in the context of 218 family businesses i.e., 1,308 stakeholders. The role is understood in terms of the gender role congruity of the successor, in simple words, the effect of the gender of the successor in shaping the social support from stakeholders. Network Relationship Inventory-Social Provisions Version (NRI-SPV) (Furman & Buhrmester, 1985) is used to conceptualize social provisions and thus, is used to measure stakeholders’ social nudge. The results imply that social nudge comprises of antagonism as negative quality and affection, nurturance and reassurance of worth as positive quality. The positive and negative social nudge by the stakeholders along with the gender effect determines the support of stakeholders towards the family business successor. Moderation analysis further reveals that gender influences the stakeholders’ positive and negative qualities.