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This article examines how the context and content of CEO successions affect the reactions of organization members in Fortune 500 firms. The influence ofpresuccessionfinancial performance, predecessor tenure, the force initiating a change in CEO, and successor origin on postsuccession disruption, management turnover, and company morale was assessed (controlling for both size and age offirm). These consequences of succession, measured in a survey to which 235 human resources executives responded, had not been investigated in previous large-scale empirical studies. The conceptual model and empirical results of this study suggest that understanding how organization members react to leadership changes is intrinsically important for organization scientists, potentially useful in explaining the effects of succession on economic performance outcomes, and valuable for those seeking to cope effectively with the aftermath of leadership transitions.

Sibling relationships can turn into rivalries that destroy family firms. In this article, clinical and theoretical research on families, organizations, and conflict resolution are drawn on to develop intervention strategies aimed at helping family firm members both increase awareness about forces that sustain destructive sibling conflicts and find ways of working through them. Competition for parental love and attention spurs sibling rivalry. Whether siblings become rivalrous depends largely on parental responses to this contest. Because adult brothers and sisters in family firms remain organizationally subordinated to their parents, they face unique challenges in overcoming sibling rivalry's harmful effects. Yet this is precisely the task confronting them if they are to sustain family management of their business through intergenerational succession.

In this article succession systems in large corporations are characterized in terms of seven dimensions: formalization, control systems, resource allocation, information systems, political criteria, technical criteria, and stuffrole. Descriptive data drmunfrom a sunrey of key informants in 235 Fnns are presented. Hypothesized relationships between succession system chamcteristics and organization-level performance measures {curporate reputation and financial performance), given the effects of contextual conditions, are tested. Results reveal that high and low performing firms differ with respect to how they manifest succession systems. Six implications for how succession systems should be managed are proposed.* The author gratefully ahowledges the following people for their advice and comments on this a r t i k .