The Field
Organisational succession is often treated as a technical episode. In practice it is a long running organisational process that reshapes identity, authority, governance, and continuity. OSI uses an integrated lens to make these dynamics legible and researchable.
What Organisational Succession Science studies
- Leadership transition and role transfer over time
- Ownership and control; including governance design
- Legitimacy; authority; and institutional narrative
- Continuity; renewal; and long horizon performance
- Family and stakeholder dynamics in founder led and mission driven contexts
Why this is a distinct domain
Existing disciplines contribute valuable insight; law clarifies rights and structures; organisational psychology clarifies identity and behaviour; governance clarifies control and accountability. Succession combines all of these simultaneously. The field exists to integrate them without reducing the problem to a single frame.
Structural; Psychological; Relational
Structural
The formal architecture of the organisation; governance frameworks, ownership structures, decision rights, and the legal and operational mechanisms that enable or constrain how responsibility transfers over time.
Psychological
The individual and collective experience of transition; identity, attachment, trust, narrative, and the behavioural conditions that shape how people navigate change and continuity in organisational life.
Relational
The interpersonal fabric of the organisation; family systems, stakeholder dynamics, power, conflict, and cohesion across generations and leadership transitions.
The aim is not persuasion; it is clarity.