Intergenerational Imprinting and Identification in Family Businesses: A Narrative Analysis

In this exploratory study, we address the phenomenon of intergenerational imprinting, understood as the process through which employees in family firms use imprinted features to imprint the next generation of their own family members. Drawing upon a qualitative, inductive case study of an agricultural family firm, we use narrative analysis techniques to tell three composite narratives of how family members transmit a frame of reference across multiple generations. We demonstrate that generations of families collectively share and use the imprinting features that persist in the organization to imprint the attitudes, mental models, and rules and principles of their family members in the current context. By considering these three composite narratives, we identified that the imprinted frames of references differ in their temporal focus. Distinguishing between two scenarios of incremental and disruptive change settings, we offer a model that theorizes the retrospective, prospective or dual focus in frames of reference and examine why each might become adaptive, maladaptive or non-adaptive in changing settings. We explain how these differences in adaptability engender a member’s sense of momentum that produces three different organizational identification trajectories (progressive, ambivalent or regressive). We contribute by moving beyond a focus on the owning family and the founder legacy in family firms and offering insights into imprints as antecedents of organizational identification trajectories that have to be viewed across multiple generations.