Succession Intention in Continuing Family Business in Indonesia during the Covid-19 Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted many industries and created a different reality of function in terms of several aspects, including family business and sucession. This paper discusses how family business successor intentions regarding succeeding the family business in the near future has been affected by the pandemic. The subjects of our study are senior undergraduate business students that could potentially become successors in their family business. Our model is based on the Intention Model from the Theory of Perceived Behaviors, modified from our previous study with Intention to succeeding family business as the dependent variable. Data of 203 valid respondents was collected through quantitative survey and analyzed using a multiple linear regression model. The results of our study show that, during the pandemic, the intention of the heirs of the family business in succeeding his/her family business will be determined by the successor’s own attitude in succeeding family business, campus education, familiness, and resiliency of family business situation in facing the pandemic. menggunakan model regresi linier berganda. Hasil penelitian kami menunjukkan bahwa, selama masa pandemi, intensi pewaris bisnis keluarga dalam melanjutkan bisnis keluarganya akan ditentukan oleh sikap penerus sendiri dalam mensukseskan sebuah bisnis keluarga, pendidikan kampus yang didapatkan, familiness, dan ketahanan bisnis keluarga dalam menghadapi pandemi.


INTRODUCTION
The impact of Covid-19 pandemic is staggering within the world economics. Every aspect of industry and business braced for the negative impact with very few survivors emerged. Donthu and Gustafsson (2020)   . Most family businesses suddenly had to adopt a more robust approach to cope with the spread of the pandemic, especially with the drastic regulations being imposed by the government (Smith et al., 2021). Others research revealed that family businesses around the world had already started mobilizing to combat the detrimental business effects of the  pandemic , many displaying unusual creativity, innovativeness, and community generosity. By redesigning operations, increasing capacity, developing new health products, and making major donations to the community, some family business made efforts to reinvent themselves as they contributed to massive collective efforts to manage the crisis (Le Breton-Miller & Miller, 2021).
The factors of familiness and closeness of family members with non-family-member employees also play a significant role in ensuring the survivability of the business.
Succession, one of the most important factors in family business stability, also faces an impact from the current pandemic. With the bleak future of business, how will the heirs of family businesses cope and consider their professional future? To address these questions, we examine the impact of Covid-19 on the situation involving the heirs of family businesses. How has the abrupt changing situation in the family business impacted the behavior and intention of succeeding in the family business? Does the heir lose his or her motivation or, in contrast, will it become the catalyst for them to improve a challenging situation into a better future?
The timing for our research could not be more appropriate. Right now, we continue to face the pandemic, as vaccines are predicted to be produced continually over the next few years. With this situation at hand, we can clearly anticipate the intention and motivation of the succession situation for the heirs of family businesses.
We created our sample with students in the School of Business and Economics Universitas Prasetiya Mulya majoring in business, especially those in their last year and those whose parents or relatives are the owners of family businesses. The last-year students will be entering the working world in less than a year, and the business world situation at that time will be not ideal for succeeding family businesses. Assuming that the pandemic will be resolved in the next few years, the business environment will still be coping with a less-thanideal economic situation compared to that before 2020. This reality will certainly have a significant effect on the intention and motivation of future heirs of family businesses.

Succession in family business
Succession is one of the most critical factors that need to be address in order for a family business to survive in the long run Mokhber et al., 2017;Tatoglu et al., 2008). A widely cited statistic suggests that 30 percent of family businesses survive into the second generation of family ownership, and just 15 percent survive into the third generation (Kets, 2015;. Unique circumstances within the family business industry will definitely introduce problems with succession, especially when the leader/patriarch of the family steps down and considers the choice of the next generation's leader. When a family business grows, the numbers of family members and business units also grow accordingly, and in the long run, the complexity of succession and future direction problems will eventually increase and become more convoluted (Liu, 2020). Thus, the factors of heir and next-generation family leader will be of utmost importance in every family business situation (Bozer et al., 2017;Filser et al., 2013;Hari Magnadi & Surya Perdhana, 2021;Hidayati et al., 2020;Ip & Jacobs, 2006).
Research shows that, in a successful succession process, the role of the next-generation heir will be more important than the role of current leader/ previous generation (Sharma et al., 2003). Therefore, it is imperative for a family business to ensure that environment and condition of their family situation in an optimal state for the next generation heir to facilitate a smooth succession (Carr & Sequeira, 2007;OH & Ferijani, 2021;Tirdasari & Dhewanto, 2012).

Implication of Theory of Perceived Behavior in intention and motivation of succeeding family business.
Theory of Perceived Behavior (TPB) helps us comprehend how to gauge someone's intention of demonstrating a certain behavior in the near future (Ajzen, 2002;Icek Ajzen, 2020). Most of the time, intention in human activities cannot be observed easily, and it becomes a common obstacle for researchers when they try to make a prediction of future behavior to a certain degree. TPB give a good foundation for making a prediction through understanding of human intention that, when the intention is significant enough, a certain pattern of behavior could be predicted in the near future.
With the understanding that the main objective of this research is about predicting and gauging on next generation heir intention of succeeding family business (become involved in leading and managing their family business in near future, quite possibly after they graduate), TPB is the right choice for this research to base the framework model of intention. Ajzen (2020) offers that the antecedents of intention could be derived into attitude to behavior, which about how individual subjectively leads to opinions of certain behavior, whether positive or negative.
Perceived behavior relates to how an individual can control one's own situation in regard to a certain behavior. Self-efficacy and control are translated into intention. Subjective norms relate to external pressure and perspective, and how others perceive a certain behavior will impact one's personal intention regarding that certain behavior.
Numerous studies on intention and behavior show that TPB was extensively applied and produced a rather satisfactory result (Ulker-Demirel & Ciftci, 2020). Application of TPB has also been manifest in numerous fields of research. Regarding today's Covid-19 pandemic, we find research cited and applied TPB to gauge human intention and behavior, such as understanding the intention of US citizens to travel during the pandemic (Ojo et al., 2021), people's intention to perform social distancing (Gibson et al., 2021), and intention to utilize health apps for Covid-19 prevention (Zoghlami et al., 2021).
In the business field, TPB is also extensively used in numerous situation, even regarding Covid (Bressan et al., 2021). TPB is a good method to gauge people's intention for purchasing activities (George, 2004).
Application of TPB is also apparent in research that focuses on students as the main subject, for instance to understand the intention of students to create their business after graduation (Jena, 2020;Kusumawardani, 2020;Maresch et al., 2016). In the family business field, TPB also helps numerous researchers to understand various activities and intentions in families, such as explaining the intention of non-family members to work for family businesses (Arijs et al., 2018), female family members' intention to lead family businesses (Duran-Encalada et al., 2021), student entrepreneurship intention to strengthen the student family business (Wahjono et al., 2019), and also the intention of successors of family businesses in continuing the business (Carr & Sequeira, 2007;Sharma et al., 2003).

How education relates to family business succession
Interestingly, we found plenty of research that support the notion of the importance of a proper education for next-generation family business successors for the survivability of a family business. Duh (2014) showed that the succession process is a knowledge-creation process in a family business.
This situation clearly shows that education is a key factor in ensuring a smooth transition of the knowledge creation process in the long run. This knowledge process creation is especially important in how a family business should manage their critical resources optimally, and proper education will help tremendously in this matter (Debicki et al., 2020). Another scholar found that heirs tend to be reasonably well prepared if they have educational background and experience . Research also showed that formal education will positively affect the regeneration process of a family business (José António Porfírio et al., 2019;Soares et al., 2021). Especially at the university level, education will affect the decisionmaking process and management knowledge of a successor to help them in conducting business in the future. Research indicates that the university phase is an important phase for a successor to determine whether he/she will succeed the family business or not (Bozer et al., 2017;Collins et al., 2013). Numerous studies have attempted to explain that entrepreneurial education programs are playing an important role to affect students' intention toward boosting their family business (Karimi & Biemans, 2017). Researchers suggest that a proper and adequate course that stems from project-based and practical situations will help to polish the skills of next-generation family business successors (Sharma et al., 2007)

Familiness resources in family business.
Familiness is a unique concept that is only apparent in family business. Described as a "unique resource," familiness is a concept regarding the complex network and connection of every family member that works and manages the business.
Familiness is known as a socioemotional wealth that is only derived from family members in family business. The fluidity and flexibility regarding how each member interacts for the greater good/family comes first, loyalty to the family, ease of procedure, and connection will help a family business gain a certain competitive advantage in the market. This familiness competitive advantage could only be observed within a family business (Forcadell et al., 2018;Habbershon & Williams, 1999). The right utilization of family connection and coherence with the stakeholder agenda will eventually leverage on family business perform (Debicki et al., 2020).
In term of succession, familiness could become an important factor in deciding how smoothly a succession occurs in the family business, especially in preparing a sturdy foundation and management for the next generation when they take the helm (Bozer et al., 2017). Having a good planned succession and keep the family bond intact will certainly help in successful transgenerational role changing (Umans et al., 2018). A family business with strong familiness factors within its internal strategy will ensure better knowledge transfer from the previous generation to the next generation (Zybura et al., 2020).

How Covid-19 affects family business.
Covid-19 led to a significant change in the global economic situation, and the impact has been felt throughout the world. Drastic changes in the market situation because of the pandemic created a major roadblock in the market. If not handled carefully, this situation will certainly impact family businesses negatively and also cause major problems in family business succession (Liu, 2020).
A group of studies has examined the family business situation in coping with the effects of Covid-19.
Research shows that how good a family business copes with an extreme disruption will depend on how adaptive the family business is with the changing technology and flexibility of the decision maker of family business to act quickly and in accordance with the situation (Brinkerink et al., 2020). Family businesses with better and stronger socioemotional wealth will react better and survive disaster. Having higher capability in decisively creating better strategies for innovation, proactivity, and risky action will help family businesses weather rough seas. Adaptability seems to become a major key in coping with Covid-19 (Alonso-Dos-Santos & Llanos-Contreras, 2019; Debicki et al., 2016). Having a good familiness factor and strong ties among family members will ensure the survivability and advantage for a family business in the pandemic (Calabrò et al., 2021).

Research Framework
The research model will focus on intention to succeed in a family business as a dependent factor being affected by several independent factors simultaneously ( Figure 1). The foundation of the model will apply TPB by referring to a previous research model (Pribadi & Agustiawan, 2021) that applies several references in accordance with the intention of the successor of a family business to succeed as the next generation (Carr & Sequeira, 2007;Zellweger et al., 2011). Gender and family business age are considered as our control variables. Research shows that, in certain situations, differences in the gender of successors of family businesses will present different situations regarding how a family business conducts its succession, especially in terms of cultural differences (Danes et al., 2005;Duran-Encalada et al., 2021;Nguyen et al., 2021). The age of the family business is also an important factor that presents significant differences in how well a family business completes its succession. Having more experiences that come with age, older and longer family businesses have a more established structure, culture, governance, and succession strategy than younger family businesses do (Allison et al., 2014;Villéger, 2018). This research will apply multiple linear regression to test the framework model by having intention of succeeding family business as a main dependent factor, which is simultaneously affected by independent factors (Attitude to succeed family business, self-efficacy, internal locus of control, perceived family member support, entrepreneur education, familiness, and family business resiliency to the Covid-19 pandemic). Ajzen (2020) also suggested applying SEM or multiple linear regression in analyzing the TPB-based model construct.

Hypotheses construction
Intention is considered a strong predictor of whether a certain behavior will be apparent in the near future. Ajzen (2002Ajzen ( , 2020   In our context, several situations should be considered. As the main study subject, the context of education is not a general management one, but rather a heavily entrepreneurship study. The main objectives of the school are to create future entrepreneurs that create their own company; thus, the setting might differ from the situation of general business school. As some researchers also pointed out, the university phase is such an important phase in one's life because, after graduation, individuals need to consider their own choice of job, whether they will succeed with the family business, whether they will pursue another direction (Bozer et al., 2017;Collins et al., 2013). In terms of entrepreneurshipbased school, research shows strong relation between a business school with strong emphasis on entrepreneurship and the choice of future career among students to become an entrepreneur. (Bae et al., 2014;Jena, 2020;Sondari, 2014). Therefore, by considering those factors, we established the relationship hypotheses between education and intention to succeed the family business in a negative way, not positive, because the focus of business school is more on entrepreneurship rather than general business settings. The better a student's perspective is on the entrepreneurship education they received from the school, the lesser their intention to succeed with the family business (because they will consider more becoming their own entrepreneur).

H2: Entrepreneur business education negatively affects succession intention
It has been established that strong familiness resources in a family business company will certainly offer better unique competitive advantages for the company (Habbershon et al., 2003;Migliori et al., 2020) Having a tough, prepared, resilient family business will certainly ensure a positive successor situation.
Confidence will be establish and a better future can be expected which will translate into the positive intention to succeed in the family business (Liu, 2020).

H4: Resiliency of family business toward Covid-19 situation positively affect succession intention.
The data sample was taken from undergraduate students in the School of Business and Economy, Universitas Prasetiya Mulya with a business major, primarily in their 3 rd or 4 th years. Our main reason for this is because senior-year undergraduate students form a primer and appropriate sample to understand intention to continue the family business in the near future. With only a year or less before graduating, they will be forced to consider seriously their future career. Our study mainly focused on one campus to help us control the antecedent effect of the education factor, especially in Universitas Prasetiya Mulya, where the Business major curriculum focuses on creating entrepreneurs, thus it will be interesting to understand how an entrepreneur curriculum impacts their intention to continue an existing family business rather than creating one's own. A purposive sampling was also done by asking whether the respondents at least have a family member that manages a business and if they will be involved in the strategic position of that company when they graduate and enter the family business. This will ensure that only students with a family business background will complete the questionnaire.

Data analysis
Data collection was conducted from January 2021 to April 2021 through several phases. The questionnaire was constructed by referring to our previous questionnaire, and some improvements were made to cater to the new framework model. We found that all of the dimension Cronbach's Alpha showed numbers greater than 0.7, which also proves that the data are reliable. We choose 0.7 as a cutoff point because, for factors with small number questions, it is quite normal to score at a lower point, and 0.7 is considered quite safe as a cutoff point in the reliability test (Taber, 2018).
Using SPSS as our statistical tool, we analyze the questionnaire data through our framework model in multiple linear regression, and we produce the statistical output as in Table 1.
Observing in Table 1

DISCUSSION
The data analysis shows some interesting findings with regard to the current situation and undergraduate students' intention to succeed in their family business management. In terms of control variables, we found that no variable significantly affects intention. This condition could stem from several reasons: We found that no significant differences between genders exist in terms of intention, which differs from previous studies about how gender relates to intention or future career choice (Duran-Encalada et al., 2021).
It is also different from other research which found that daughters in family businesses face a range of special challenges in considering their career opportunities both within and outside of the family business due to gender-based dynamics in the family, in the organization, and in society (Constantinidis & Nelson, 2009). Another scholar provided another angle, stating that men and woman are motivated toward succession when they have a high level of education and a defined succession plan that seems to guarantee the  (Porfírio et al., 2020). This result could come from the main respondents of our study, which are undergraduate students from relatively stable and high society upbringing. Research in Indonesia family business also support our findings by showing that gender has less importance regarding succession rather than the person's interest to drive the intention (Ramadani et al., 2017). Situational choice of sample also plays an interesting role in terms of gender importance in a more homogenic culture as in our campus (which mostly come from the Jabodetabek area). This show lesser importance of gender roles, as the local culture tends to be more modern and appreciative of female emancipation (Rachmawati et al., 2020).
Regarding  (Bae et al., 2014;Guerrero et al., 2020;Jena, 2020). This finding shows us that, during the pandemic, having a strong family foundation and network will create an optimistic future in which business will face tough situations. This will then embolden the positive intention from the next generation of family members to contribute to the family business.
Having a good management and strategic decision making will create strong resiliency during the pandemic and will bring positive value to those of the next generation. Compared to previous study (Pribadi & Agustiawan, 2021), which applies a similar model but focuses on a different situation (non-Covid era vs Covid era), we identify some interesting comparisons.
The previous study was conducted the survey in late 2019 to early 2020, right before the pandemic become a worldwide concern. Therefore, we could safely assume that previous study in a way paints a portrait of the successor's intention for the family business before the pandemic. Research showed that students in entrepreneurial school will cope by transferring their entrepreneurial knowledge and skill into useful assets for their family business management (Hahn et al., 2021).
Therefore, in a normal economic climate, having entrepreneurial skills could be seen as an advantage in choosing either succeeding in the family business or building their own business but within the boundary and advantage of having a family business connection (such as a spinoff or diversification from main business).
On the other hand, familiness still shows a strong positive factor that affects the intention of future generations in succeeding in the family business.
No matter the stable or volatile situation, having a good structure family business management and strong positive bonding within a family will certainly give a strong push for a successor when considering taking over the family business management. This is also in line with previous research, which says that familiness is a major factor in the succession development process for each generation (Venter et al., 2010).

MANAGERIAL IMPLICATION
Results from this research reaffirms the models that emphasize how a family business should approach their operational and strategy in a pandemic. Strong ties and networks in the family, good resiliency, and readiness to face the unknown situation will certainly boost confidence and moral for next generation candidate to seriously consider in succeeding the family business. This paper also points out that, in dire situations, the most important element of intention will always be the subject's own internal motivation rather than external motivation.
In higher educational situations, interesting factors also being observed in how a strong tendency of entrepreneurial curriculum in a school will steer a family business successor away from succeeding family business in a pandemic. This finding might inspire consideration for a university about whether it should diversify its family business core curriculum rather than incorporating all of its education in a general entrepreneurial curriculum. By providing more specialized family business curricula, schools might be able to help family businesses in nurturing their successors in terms of education and intention, especially during a pandemic.

CONCLUSION
This research examined how the intention of a next-generation successor in family business, especially in undergraduate students, is affected by several factors, especially during a pandemic.
We found that, during the pandemic, intention to succeed in family business management will be affected mainly by several factors: Positively, the internal motivation and attitude of the successor to the succession opportunity itself, familiness, and how good the family business copes with the pandemic will support the successor's intention to succeed in the family business. On the other hand, entrepreneurship education that is conducted in successor education will negatively affect the intention to engage in family business succession.
As this study is still very limited in its early stages, restriction and careful consideration are also needed when reviewing our results. Limitations of only choosing the population from a certain school will definitely restrict the application of our conclusion to a more general situation. A broader sample, including those in different schools in the same university, or different schools from different universities and different regions, will be needed to provide a greater picture of successors' situations and intentions during the pandemic in Indonesia.
Longitudinal study also could provide deeper study about the real effect of the pandemic and how it changes year after year. Examining the situation now and combining it with a post-Covid environment will certainly help us to understand more about the dynamic situation that is taking place throughout the pandemic.