Abstract:
When ownership starts getting dispersed among several individuals, families, branches, and generations, a need for organizing communications and decision-making usually arises to ensure functional relationships within the family. The need for a shared vision and mutually agreed ways of handling the shared ownership emerges, and a process for developing a family governance structure is often initiated. Family governance, hence, appears to be a central topic in family business research, but we still lack a more profound and specific understanding of how the owner family uses different family governance mechanisms to manage specific situations with possible conflicting goals, interests, and opinions, or just to develop the shared ownership further for or together with the next generation. The aim of this chapter is to give an overview and highlight different processes developed by the family within owner families with dispersed ownership to identify and align governance goals. This overview intends to broaden the understanding of what the role of family governance, as a family internal mechanism, can be in owner families with dispersed ownership among several family members.
