Tacit Knowledge and Skills Transfer in Family Business During Generational Succession

The succession process remains a critical challenge in family businesses (Ramadani et al., 2015; Ramadani and Hoy,
2015), as this factor is connected to the low survival rate in the long term of the same. One of the reasons for this challenge
may concern the successor's ability to adequately acquire the predecessor's silent and explicit knowledge and critical skills
to maintain and improve the company's organizational performance. Much research focused on the successor profile (De
Massis et al., 2008), highlighting the multiplicity of the skills requested. Recent studies show that the successor must have
both hard and soft competence (Beeson, 2009). Hard skills refer to the technical skills related to work, cognitive skills, and
traditional and learned skills (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 2006, Laker and Powell, 2011) or those objectively measurable and
demonstrable skills, such as the ability to identify business opportunities, to develop a business vision, to create and manage
business networks and their work (Bird and Jelinek, 1989; Chandler and Jensen, 1992; Charles-Pauvers et al., 2004, Laviolette,
2006). On the contrary, the transversal intangible and difficult-to-measure skills reflect "skills and traits that concern
personality, attitude and behavior" (Moss & Tilly, 2001) as motivation, communication, team spirit, and trust in themselves.
Therefore it is essential to find practical tools, given the poor literature on the topic, to transfer silent Knowledge, skill,
legitimacy, and credibility, which are of fundamental importance for the members of the new generation family (Le Breton-
Miller et al., 2004). On these premises, our work aims to answer the following questions 1. What are the tacit knowledge
tools used in knowledge transfer? 2. Which of them are helpful to transfer skills? The methodology of this work involves the
administration of a semi-structured interview with family companies who are experiencing the generational transition or
have lived it.