Everyone talks about role conflict in the family business: being a father and chairman, a daughter and CFO, at the same time. It’s visible, it comes up at Christmas dinner, and it makes headlines. There’s another problem, less talked about, that according to the data weighs more heavily on performance: role ambiguity.
They are distinct phenomena, and organizational psychology has told them apart since Kahn and his team at the University of Michigan, in 1964. Conflict is holding two roles at once with demands that clash. Ambiguity is not knowing what’s expected of you in the role you hold: what you can decide, up to what amount, whom you need to ask first. In the family business, ambiguity has an accomplice: the idea that trust can substitute for a protocol, that “we already know how we do things here.” It’s almost never written down. And everyone understands it differently.
What the data says
The Tubre and Collins (2000) meta-analysis, covering studies of organizations in general, finds that both phenomena are associated with tension and dissatisfaction in similar ways, but not with performance: there, role ambiguity’s correlation (r = .21) is three times that of role conflict (r = .07). These are modest correlations, not causal relationships, and the specific application to family business is my own reading of that data. But the direction is clear: what costs performance the most isn’t holding two roles that clash, it’s not knowing which role you hold.
It’s not only a climate issue
Roles in a family business aren’t only psychological. They’re also legal positions, with different duties depending on who holds them. The founder who formally steps down but keeps deciding may be acting as a de facto director, and answer as one. The child who is the formal director and lets others decide doesn’t escape that duty either. Put differently: the one who decides doesn’t answer for it, and the one who answers for it doesn’t decide. That disconnect between who actually runs things and who holds the title is, almost always, unresolved role ambiguity.
Conflict is contained, ambiguity is eliminated
They don’t have the same remedy. Role conflict doesn’t disappear with a protocol: your father is still going to be your father on the board, and no document changes that. What you can do is contain it, separating the spaces (shareholders’ meeting, board of directors, family council) so each role is exercised in its own, and naming it out loud when needed: “I’m answering this as a shareholder,” not as a son.
Ambiguity, by contrast, can be eliminated, because its source is that something isn’t written down. It’s resolved by putting in writing who decides what: each body’s remit, the board’s regulations, the job description for each position a family member holds in the business, powers of attorney with their limits, the family protocol that sets who joins the business and under what conditions. It sounds like bureaucracy. That’s precisely the one thing ambiguity can’t survive.
The first step, before trying to fix anything, is knowing which of the two problems you’re facing.
I’ve also prepared a downloadable document with this same idea, with the study’s data and both solutions explained step by step.
How we work on this at Alta Mediación
We help business families put the division of roles and power in writing — who decides what, in which body, and within what limits — before ambiguity turns into open conflict. If your board has never written down who decides what, let’s talk about your situation, or find out how we work in Family Business and Family Protocols.
Pablo Gómez-Acebo Calonje is a lawyer (Madrid and New York), a mediator and a graduate in Psychology, and founder of Estudio Jurídico Alta Mediación. He advises business families on designing their corporate and family governance.