Enhancing Family Business Successor’s Ability and Motivation

The worldwide phenomenon of third generation decline in family business could stem from diminishing entrepreneurial motivation of the successors or from im-perfect conditioning of the successors by their predecessors. Given the significance of family business to the economy, this study sought to qualitatively find out how successful family business successions were and what provided the successor with more ability, more motivation, and/or less obstacle in succeeding his/her family business from ten successors of Stock Exchange of Thailand listed family service businesses. On the first objective, despite the supportive findings, concluding that most successions were totally successful would be naive. On the second objective, having capable team together with five other factors were essential factors identi-fied. Implications were discussed. Keywords: Family business, Succession, Enhancing ability&motivation.