Conflict Management and Negotiation in Family Business Succession: Critical Literature Review and research agenda

Abstract

This paper intends to stimulate a serious debate on the topic of conflict in family businesses and the theory of negotiation as a tool to resolve these conflicts. The methodology is based on the collection and systematization of the main literature on these topics. The study results show that, despite the literature on conflict management is highly developed as well as literature on family business, scholars and researchers have not yet deepened several areas of conflict management in family businesses, so the two fields of literature are yet not well integrated. The paper then proposes a research agenda identifying the issues and research gaps that should be explored by researchers in order to reach a more mature literature on conflict resolution in family businesses.