The Role of Ownership Transition Models on Corporate Performance and Longevity: Systematic Literature Review

This paper examines how ownership transition models, as a key factor in family firms (Eddleston et al., 2024), affect firm performance and survival. It synthesizes prior studies to identify primary transition strategies and reveals their impact on outcomes.

A systematic literature review synthesizes 76 theoretical and empirical articles from Scopus, selected via rigorous inclusion and exclusion criteria, to identify ownership transitions in family businesses and analyze their impact.

The review reveals wide variation in how ownership transition models affect firm outcomes, largely due to inconsistent definitions, contextual differences, and methodological limitations. Intra-family successions tend to enhance longevity through socioemotional wealth preservation but can limit innovation, while external transitions—such as M&As, MBIs, or IPOs—often improve short-term financial results at the cost of family cohesion. These mixed findings highlight the need for longitudinal, multi-level research that clarifies when and how different transition strategies influence performance and survival.

This study consolidates fragmented evidence by comparing six ownership transition models and linking their diverse outcomes to governance, socioemotional, and contextual factors. It moves the debate from whether transitions matter to how and under what conditions they do, offering a structured agenda for developing an integrated, evidence-based understanding of ownership change and its impact on family firm performance and continuity.