Navigating non-family CEO succession in family businesses.

Succession in family businesses poses unique challenges due to the overlap of ownership and leadership roles. The complexity of such challenges is heightened when considering a non-family member as a successor for leading the business. This thesis explores why family businesses hire non-family CEOs. The investigation unfolds across three papers, a systematic literature review and two empirical papers, each contributing to a comprehensive understanding of non- family leadership succession. The literature review paper presents that existing research primarily examines the outcomes of leadership successions and largely ignores the decisions behind these. The paper lays the foundation with a conceptual framework derived from a systematic review of 53 articles, which reveals a knowledge gap on non-family CEO succession decisions through a non-family CEO succession framework. This framework guides the subsequent empirical inquiry. The two empirical papers address this gap by adopting an interpretivist approach. The second and third papers draw on qualitative data from 29 interviews with UK-based family business owners. The second paper provides an in-depth examination of the factors influencing the non-family CEO succession decision and presents that it is not one but two decisions: (1) a decision to consider non-family candidates and (2) a decision to select a non- family CEO amongst the candidate pool. The third paper identifies and focuses on the influences of four distinct roles family owners play in making the decision to consider non-family CEO candidates for the CEO position. The conceptual and empirically grounded models developed in this thesis open the black box of non- family CEO succession and allow family businesses to explore non-family CEO succession opportunities.