Succession process and the impact of gender in Puerto Rican family businesses

Abstract

This paper explores succession phenomena in four Puerto Rican businesses. The main conclusion is that there are differences between the succession pro-cess for daughters and sons because of a stereotypical concept of women’s role and leadership within businesses. Daughters appear to have full access to presidency only when the father dies. Before that, daughters exercise a periph-eral leadership within the organization to construct their leadership space and, at the same time, transmit the values of the business. Opposed to daughters, sons achieve full presidency power and leadership upon confrontation with the father. Main sources of resistance in leadership transition from father to daughters came from external constituencies.