Continue the Story or Turn the Page? Coworker Reactions to Inheriting a Legacy

Abstract

Existing work on legacy in management has focused on the upper echelons and on the legator— the person leaving the legacy. Drawing on the meaning maintenance model and concepts surrounding psychological ownership and identity, we build a model that focuses on legatees— the beneficiaries of the legacy—in the lower echelons. The departure of a manager, informal leader, or star serves as a disruption to legatees’ mental representations of their working world. That disruption causes them to attend to issues of ownership (either psychological ownership or disownership of the legacy) and identity (either identification or rivalry with the legator) in order to fulfill salient needs. Fulfilling continuity and belonging needs results in two behaviors that enhance the durability of the legator’s contributions: maintaining and evangelizing. Fulfilling distinctiveness and efficacy needs results in two behaviors that reduce the durability of the legator’s contributions: neglecting and erasing. We theorize that these relationships are moderated by two aspects of the legacy: its magnitude and content (in terms of whether the contributions are tangible or intangible). We describe the implications of our model for the legacy literature in management and lay out an agenda for future research.