Twentieth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

Recently, the management mainstream has argued that successful change management is decisive for any organization that aims to succeed and maintain its existence. Shockingly enough, the statistics indicate a high failure rate of approximately 70% of all change projects. In attempting to solve that issue, managers typically place their prime emphasis on the cognitive aspects of change, using mainly rational well-structured reasoning. The main idea of this article is to propose a whole new perspective of change management that focuses on the affective and emotional side of change. Family firms appear to be a propitious environment to study emotional patterns during change implementation process. Therefore, we decided to examine how a family firm’s socio-emotional wealth interacts with the change process. We aim to offer a dynamic description of how these variables interact during the whole process. This appears to be relevant because the available body of literature offers only generalist approaches of change management that do not take into consideration the idiosyncratic criteria of family firms.