Building trust during succession in family businesses: a qualitative case study of Korean incumbent–successor dyads

Purpose This study investigates how trust is built between an incumbent CEO and a successor during family business succession. While prior research treats trust as a key determinant of successful succession, the process through which it forms inside the incumbent–successor dyad remains under-explored, particularly in East Asian contexts shaped by Confucian familial norms. The study is exploratory and theory-building in orientation. Design/methodology/approach Following Eisenhardt (1989) multiple-case methodology and Gioia et al.'s (2013) coding logic, this study conducted semi-structured interviews with five incumbent CEOs and six successors (eleven informants in total) drawn from seven Korean family firms in manufacturing, oriental medicine, and service industries. A narrative episode analysis was applied; 344 episodes were independently coded by three qualitative analysts, yielding percentage agreement of 0.840 (substantial agreement). Four of the seven firms contributed matched incumbent–successor dyads (Firms A–D); three firms provided data from only one side of the dyad and were treated as incomplete cases in the analytical strategy. Findings Three patterns emerged across the cases. First, in Korean family-firm dyads, informants retrospectively narrated trust as moving from emotional trust (rooted in the parent–child bond) toward managerial trust (rooted in demonstrated competence), in contrast with the direction predicted by dominant Western trust-development models. Second, the two trust forms coexisted in informant accounts rather than substituting one another. Third, an interpretive asymmetry emerged across the four matched dyads: incumbents narrated actively cultivating trust, whereas successors tended to describe trust as an inherited endowment of family membership. Across the six successor interviews, the incumbent's spouse was the most frequently mentioned third party in disputes. Originality/value By integrating the socioemotional wealth (SEW) perspective and stewardship theory with relational trust research, the study offers an interpretive process model of perceived trust forms in dyads that begin with a pre-existing kinship bond – a scope condition under which the unidirectional Western trust-evolution models may not describe informant experience. Because the design is retrospective and cross-sectional, the findings are best read as exploratory propositions inviting confirmatory work on larger and longitudinal samples.