Abstract:

Family businesses represent the oldest form of business organization in the world. In such organizations, the control is held by a family, which is responsible for appointing the management, and often involves some of its members in the activities and work in the company. The involvement of family members in business operations creates some specific challenges for these firms, namely regarding the conciliation between family and work, a topic that may lead to serious problems whenever clear boundaries between such contexts are not defined. In order to address many of the specific challenges of such business contexts, some specific competences may be required. Among these, it is often mentioned that the ability to act entrepreneurially together as a family, and to create the conditions for business growth. Therefore, it is important for the future of the family firm's management to develop adequate competences and to transfer these competences to future generations. Competences are a set of characteristics, a combination of knowledge, skills, abilities, and personality traits that may enable someone to achieve superior performance. In this context, the aim of this paper is to describe the state of the art of the challenges that the family businesses face, while discussing how developing certain competences may help overcome those challenges and achieve success. Through a bibliographic study, it was possible to list the main challenges faced by family firm managers and more important to identify the strategies to overcome these challenges and drawbacks.