Choosing the next generation: what Chinese family business founders seek in their successors

Purpose This study identifies the successor competencies that founders consider most important for the continuity of Chinese family businesses and examines how firm and founder characteristics shape these evaluations. Building on an integrative framework of human capital, social capital, dynamic capabilities, and socioemotional wealth (SEW) theory, the study develops context-specific theoretical expectations about why founders may prioritize different competency bundles. Design/methodology/approach The study uses 1,164 valid responses from a large cross-sectional survey of founders and controlling owner-managers of Chinese family firms conducted across China. Nine single-item competency ratings are summarized descriptively. Our respondent-level ranking records are audited and cleaned, yielding 1,117 valid complete rankings. The three focal competency ratings are estimated using ordinary least squares (OLS) with HC3 heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors. Ordered-logit, collinearity, industry-base-category, non-listed-subsample, and succession-stage sensitivity analyses are reported as robustness checks. Findings Relationship management and resource integration receive the highest mean importance ratings (both approximately 4.47). Based on our cleaned respondent-level rankings, relationship management (726 valid top-three selections), resource integration (712), and imitation and innovation (694) are the three most frequently prioritized competencies; learning and communication is third by mean rating (4.34). Our regression models from the respondent-level data show that the listed firms assign uniformly high ratings to all three modelled competencies, producing positive OLS associations but complete separation in ordered-logit models. Greater family ownership is positively associated with relationship-management ratings but negatively associated with imitation-and-innovation ratings, while founder education is negatively associated with imitation-and-innovation ratings in the baseline model. These associations are robust to several alternative specifications but are interpreted cautiously because of the cross-sectional design and limited variation in listing status and ownership. Originality/value The study contributes founder-side evidence to the succession literature, which has more often examined successors, managers, or small qualitative samples. It develops a context-sensitive competency architecture integrating human capital, social capital, dynamic capabilities, and socioemotional wealth perspectives. By deriving theory-guided expectations from these perspectives and examining systematic within-sample variation in founder priorities across organizational contexts, the study advances a more nuanced understanding of succession criteria in emerging-market family firms while remaining explicitly descriptive and associational.