A conceptual framework of executive coaching in family business succession planning: the Malaysian context

ABSTRACT

Family business succession planning receives much attention globally, but executive coaching remains underutilized. This applies to family-owned businesses; particularly challenging would be the survivorship of small and medium enterprises. Given the growing need for more effective succession planning, this paper aims to improve the existing executive coaching framework by applying it to family business succession planning in Malaysia. This conceptual article contains an accessible definition and presentation of executive coaching. Each framework component depicts the coach, coached person (‘coachee’), and organizational roles in the coaching, which leads to the possible leadership transfer outcome. This paper suggests a new succession planning direction for researchers and executive coaches. The planning direction aims to aid family business owners in understanding the executive coaching ‘what, why, and how’ and an alternative succession planning approach is suggested. The mechanism of executive coaching and the basis for novel family business research are discussed and established.

KEYWORDS:

• Family business
• succession planning
• executive coaching
• multidimensional theory
• socioemotional wealth theory
• small medium enterprise
• Malaysia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).